Former presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton will be Wellesley College's 2017 commencement speaker, her spokesperson confirms.
Clinton, who won the 2016 presidential election's popular vote but lost the Electoral College, graduated from Wellesley with a degree in political science in 1969 before attending Yale University for her law degree.
"As Wellesley students, we arrive here believing in a future that respects women’s potential and accomplishment, but as graduating seniors, and at this moment in history, we look to Secretary Clinton, our sister, as someone who will inspire us to make that future now,” said Casey Butler ’17, co-president of the senior class, in a statement.
Wellesley College's commencement is scheduled for May 26.
This isn't Clinton's first time speaking at a commencement ceremony at Wellesley College, either. In 1969, she was her alma mater's first-ever student commencement speaker.
It was her first brush with national politics. Just 21, she put aside prepared remarks to address U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke, the speaker who preceded her, famously saying "the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible."
