After committing to Harvard following her graduation from Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C., Malia spent a gap year traveling and interning in New York, almost like a normal kid, not counting the Secret Service escort.
She started off with a trip to Liberia and Morocco in July 2016 with Sasha, their mom and grandmother Marian Robinson to promote the Let Girls Learn Initiative. The Obama family went on their usual summer getaway to Martha’s Vineyard.
And toward the end of that year, Malia spent 83 days in Peru and Bolivia, where she lived with a family in the town of Tiquipaya, a trip so unpublicized that no one knew she was gone until after she got back to the U.S.
“She was very humble, chatty, spoke Spanish very well,” Gregorio Mamani, one of the guides on a five-day hike Malia took through the Cordillera Real mountain range, told The New York Times. “She was mesmerized by the Bolivian landscape.” Minus the added security, all of those on the excursion were expected to look after themselves and Malia reportedly acquitted herself admirably, doing her share of the cooking and other chores.
She spent a few months as an intern at The Weinstein Company in early 2017 (after reports detailing years of sexual assault and harassment allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein came out later that year, the Obamas said they were “disgusted”), her second entertainment gig after a stint on the set of Girls in 2015.