For many American television viewers, their nightly news is highlighted by the informed and trusted reporting of Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s prime-time progressive voice. She broke barriers when she joined the network, becoming the first openly LGBTQ host of a major network news program, and coining the controversy-cliffhanger phrase, “watch this space.”

While her earnest delivery and thorough reporting have earned her accolades, her reputation owes some of its prestige to her remarkable education. Her original career trajectory was not toward cable news broadcasting but political science, a subject that is part and parcel of her nightly show. In 1994, she received her bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University before becoming an activist exposing the HIV/AIDS crisis in America’s prison system. Instead of pursuing activism full-time, Maddow used her advocacy as the inspiration for her graduate studies. She became the first openly gay woman to attend Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, ultimately achieving a doctorate in political science with her thesis on prison healthcare reform in Britain and America.

With Maddow’s credentials, it’s easy to see why she is a successful political analyst on top of her thoughtful reportage. Considering everything that drove her to pursue a career in broadcasting, she understands how important her humanities studies were. In 2013, she returned to the Palo Alto school, nearly 20 years after graduating, to address Stanford’s Honors Program in Ethics and Society about the importance of humanities in her career and the future of the student body.

She especially credits her time as a member of the Society and her studies of philosophy, logic, ethics, critical thinking, and debate as crucial factors to her career success and professional prestige. But her time at the university was filled with adversity and alienation due to the anti-LGBTQ attitudes of the time, yet she prides herself for her perseverance. Her dedication to exploring the search for truth vastly outweighed her discomfort, and her Stanford undergraduate studies formed the bedrock of her career as a journalist and activist.

Today, Maddow is not only one of TV’s most popular pundits, but she has also been an essential catalyst to the reimagining of political news and opinions on the medium. While broadcast networks cover the day-to-day reporting in the early evening, prime-time cable news hosts now dedicate blocks to the inner workings of the U.S. government while selling their side’s agenda at the same time. What has set Maddow apart is her deep examination of an array of issues, buoyed by her commitment to speaking truth to power. She’s also a successful author of books that provide further depth to complex world issues. Her time painstakingly studying the humanities at Stanford, as well as her experience as a college activist, have given her the confidence as an authority on the search for truth.