We're talking about Wendy Davis:
Meet Senator Wendy Davis from Generation TX on Vimeo.
On the other hand, maybe she is although she certainly didn't think she was a typical student when she entered. Then again, neither was another notable graduate, yunno, that guy currently in the White House.
Senator Davis is by any account an American success story. Work hard, take advantage of the institutions any advanced Western society offers and you can, to be cliche, make a name for yourself.
I went to high school with people just like her, in fact, I could have been in high school with the Senator (she's two years younger than me). I grew up in a single parent household back when, as conservatives still seem to believe, it was viewed somewhat as a stigma. A parent with a high school education moving hither and yon trying to make a living, I know what it's like to live in world of limited horizons.
She married right out of high school and had her first child. She then divorced, hence the "single teen mother" meme the conservatives are latching onto out of context. In her early 20s, somebody saw something in her and gave her a brochure for a local two-year college. She decided paralegal studies interested her but clearly that wasn't enough so when she completed the local program, she went to a four-year college.
Then Harvard Law School.
As she states in the video, when she was there she never forgot where she came from: a poor family of four living in a trailer in Texas whose mother had a 6th grade education and struggled to make ends meet.
Her story is an American story but it's also a Democrat's story in that she never forgot the empathy that runs through almost everything we liberals stand for. And that showed last week in the Texas Senate chambers. It's wonderful not only seeing a Democrat in a sea (cesspool?) of Republicans tilt at the proverbial windmill but also one who's background I understand better than most.