Malia Obama To Join Harvard After A Gap Year

This Sunday, the White House made the announcement regarding the college selection that many in the nation are debating about---which college would the eldest daughter Malia Obama attend?

It turned out to be pretty simple. Just.... Harvard University.

However, the 17-year-old Sidwell Friends senior will not be attending it this Fall session.

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama said that Malia "will take a gap year before beginning school." She will commence her Harvard session in the fall of 2017, as a member of the 2021 class.

Last September, President Obama gave some advice to Malia: "Don't worry too much about which school you choose."

One simple Stanford University t-shirt that she wore in 2014 immediately began the speculation. Was she planning to join Stanford or one of the more than a dozen other colleges?

On Sunday morning, the questions were put to rest when the White House emailed reporters a two-sentence news release on the traditional May 1 deadline, announcing Malia's selection.

It had definitely been a much-debated topic in their home. Malia's specific choice of college was regularly discussed during their dinner conversations, while they also shared the advice they gave her, even as she navigated the college-admissions process.

"The one thing I've been telling my daughters is that I don't want them to choose a name," Michelle Obama told the editors of Seventeen magazine in an article published in April. "I don't want them to think, 'Oh, I should go to these top schools.' We live in a country where there are thousands of amazing universities. So the question is: What's going to work for you?"

Michelle is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She was giving the same suggestion that the president, who has graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law, said he had given Malia. "Just because it's not some name-brand, famous, fancy school doesn't mean that you're not going to get a great education there," Obama had explained to some high school students last September.

However, some see her choice of Harvard as actually a kind of rebellion, "sort of".

"The challenge of being a first child is to be normal within the context of all the scrutiny, and the challenge of everybody around them is to pretend like they're normal and nothing's out of the ordinary, which puts an enormous amount of stress on both the kid and the school," said Gil Troy, a presidential historian at McGill University and the author of "The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s." "The larger the institutional ego of the place, the more comfortable you can feel about the ability to cope with that and still have as close to a normal experience as possible."

The details of the daughters' activities are a secret, so The White House was not forthcoming with more comments on either her choice of college or her "gap year."

However, while Malia's test scores, as well as grade-point average, are not known, her interest in films is well known, as she has been an intern for the CBS series "Extant" and HBO's "Girls."

Still, the Obamas have described their firstborn as a scholarly and "avid reader." She is the sort of student who was not satisfied with average grades, said her father.

Michelle was wary about 'bratty' moments being caught on the social media and shared with millions, as her daughters have been the first children to have grown up in the White House during the age of the social media.

The sisters have been spared the collective scrutiny of the country, as Malia's visit to Brown University was captured in the student newspaper there, which was followed with an editorial titled "Sorry, Malia Obama."

"It is a shame that Malia was unable to visit Brown and enjoy herself at a party without several news headlines coming out about it the next day," the editorial read.

"Malia did not choose to grow up in the White House, and it is unfair that everything she does at just 17 years old is subject to such harsh scrutiny," said the editorial, agreeing that "the chances of her selecting Brown have probably decreased since the publication of those articles."

Michelle too recently noted that the "fishbowl" of living in Washington was enervating for them. "The older they got, the less excited they were about living in a museum, and they just wanted to live in a regular home," she added.

Next year, Malia will emerge from her secluded existence when she joins a "regular" college freshman year, but she would perhaps be protected as usual by Secret Service officers.

Malia sure does her own laundry, though. As Michelle Obama said in a 2011 interview with Oprah Winfrey: "I don't want her to be that kid who is 15 or 16, and [she's saying], 'Oh, I don't know how to do laundry.' I would cringe if she became that kid." She said she wanted both of them to do "their own business."

"And you're not living in the White House forever," the first lady said. "You're going to college."