By Greg Forester, Staff Writer
A portrait of first lady Michelle Obama will be placed in the Tap Room of the Nassau Inn with pictures of other Princeton University alumni of note during an invitation-only ceremony at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Ms. Obama graduated from Princeton University in 1985, receiving a bachelor’s degree in sociology with honors.
Sponsoring the event are the university’s Department of Sociology and the Center for African American Studies. The two academic units are where Ms. Obama spent significant time during her studies at Princeton.
Instructors and other academics who worked with Ms. Obama during her time at Princeton will speak at the event, including Professor Walter Wallace, who supervised Ms. Obama’s work on her senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”
Emeritus Professor Marvin Bressler, who chaired the sociology department during Ms. Obama’s time at Princeton, is also scheduled to speak. He was a close mentor to Ms. Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, who graduated from Princeton in 1985.
Ms. Obama, who remains a member of the sociology department’s advisory board, received an award citation for her thesis and later attended Harvard Law School.
Following law school she worked at the Chicago offices of the Sidney Austin corporate law firm, where she met her future husband, President Barack Obama.
She mentored him while he worked as a summer associate at the firm and later attended civic events with President Obama before the two began dating.
Ms. Obama and President Obama, a one-time U.S. senator from Illinois, married in 1992 and have two children.
University officials said the school has presented Ms. Obama’s framed senior photo to the Nassau Inn for installation.
When the portrait takes its place on the Tap Room’s class photo wall it will join those of such noteworthy Princeton alumni as Bill Bradley, former U.S. senator from New Jersey, James Baker, former U.S. secretary of state, actor Jimmy Stewart and actress Brooke Shields.

