Lights, camera, education! Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and Miranda Cosgrove are among the child stars who decided to get college degrees amid their fame.
Watson graduated from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 2014. During a November 2010 interview with Marie Claire, the Harry Potter franchise star reflected on her freshman year at the Ivy League school.
“Brown has a real sense of community and people are very protective of me,” she shared at the time, praising her classmates for respecting her privacy. “They really look out for me; they want me to feel like I’m part of it. I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn’t even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I’d found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged.”
One month ahead of her May 2014 graduation from the prestigious university, the Little Women actress told Elle that she’d been warned it “wasn’t possible” to complete her degree while pursuing acting.
“I kept saying, ‘I don’t care.’ This is what I want. And graduating will, for me, be really symbolic of all of that,” she said, adding that would be “throwing a huge party” and “getting very drunk” after receiving her diploma.
Portman, for her part, graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2003. The Black Swan actress enrolled at the school just after appearing in Star Wars: Episode 1 and feared that her classmates wouldn’t take her seriously.
“When I came in as a freshman in 1999, I felt like there had been some mistake, that I wasn’t smart enough to be in this company,” she admitted while serving as the keynote speaker at Harvard’s Class Day in May 2014.
The Oscar winner confessed that although she had once dismissed show business as “frivolous,” her time studying psychology helped her realize that acting is her true passion.
“I admitted to myself I couldn’t wait to go back and make more films,” she said. “I had reclaimed my reason.”
Cosgrove, meanwhile, began attending the University of Southern California in 2012, the same year iCarly’s final episode aired. The Drake & Josh alum opened up about the “weirdest part” of attending college as a public figure during a September 2014 interview with ABC News.
“I’ll go on Instagram or the Internet and there will be pictures of me from school that random people took and I didn’t know they took,” she shared. “So, that can be kind of weird sometimes.”
The “Kissin U” songstress, who switched majors several times before landing on psychology, added that her fame also helped her make new friends on campus.
“People come up to me and introduce themselves and it kind of opens the door, so that part of it’s nice,” she added. “I feel like I’m not the kind of person that would just go up to somebody and introduce myself, so, it’s helped me in a lot of ways.”
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