After graduating from high school in 1979, Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend
Occidental College on a full scholarship. In February 1981, Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the
disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of
apartheid. In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister Maya and visited the families of college friends in
Pakistan for three weeks. Later in 1981, he
transferred to
Columbia University in New York City as a
junior, where he majored in
political science with a specialty in
international relations and in
English literature and lived off-campus on West 109th Street. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 and a 3.7
GPA. After graduating, Obama worked for about a year at the
Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer, then as a project coordinator for the
New York Public Interest Research Group on the
City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.
