AOC's Historic Boston University Administration And Ted Kennedy Connection Revisited
"`Ocasio-Cortez would join Kennedy's office as an intern...She was part of what was known as `The BU 500', those...students who...seem to have a close relationship with the administration...`"
Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez now represents some Bronx and some Queens residents in the U.S. Congress, a private university in Boston, Massachusetts--Boston University--is the university that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez historically attended. As David Freedlander recalled in his 2021 book, The AOC Generation: How Millenials are seizing power and rewriting the rules of American politics:
"It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2011, and...she was a college senior, and the lone student on the Boston University campus invited to speak at the university's annual remembrance ceremony...Ocasio-Cortez studied economics and international relations at Boston University...
"Friends say that she was animated in college by a lot of the same concerns that animated her early political career...Ocasio-Cortez would join [then Democratic U.S. Senator Ted] Kennedy's office as an intern...Ocasio-Cortez...worked for Kennedy's immigrant constituent office...
"...If you were a Boston University student at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century--even if you weren't a regular at the Thruman Center or part of the regular Coffee and Conversation group or in the slam poetry group or in Alianza Latina, the school's Latin American student organization--you more than likely knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was...
"She was part of what was known as `The BU 500', those...students who...seem to have a close relationship with the administration...She gave a Ted Talk alongside other Boston-area college students in which her bio read: `A social entrepreneur...She has consulted non-profits, worked in government, and launched a media enterprise...'...She was quoted in a National Public Radio [NPR] story about how college students were reacting to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces...AOC...said,`...This villain has been slayed...'"