Early Life
Shalala was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Maronite Catholic Lebanese immigrant parents and has a twin sister, Diane Fritel. She graduated from West Tech High School and received her bachelor's degree in 1962 from Western College for Women (which, in 1976, was merged with Miami University in Oxford, Ohio). She is 5'1" tall.
She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran from 1962–64, where she worked with other volunteers to construct an agricultural college.
She received a Master's and then, in 1970, a Doctorate degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.
Read more about this topic: Donna Shalala
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)