All Grown Up: Malia Obama Through The Years (6 of 9)

She graduated from Harvard in 2021

The Obama family enjoyed a 10-day vacation in Bali before dropping off Malia at Harvard in August. Barack Obama admitted struggling with emotions, trying not to cry in front of her. Malia’s enrollment at Harvard, where she majored in Visual and Environmental Studies, mirrored Caroline Kennedy’s in the 1970s to some degree, but with the added challenges of social media, including Facebook, which ironically got its start on that very campus.

Obama described dropping her off as akin to “open-heart surgery.” COVID-19 cut short her campus life in 2020, necessitating a return to her parents’ home for remote learning. Despite challenges, the family found joy in bonding during quarantine. Malia’s graduation in 2020 was held virtually, where she received special recognition and a Hoopes Prize for her screenplay “Yellow Light,” winning a case prize of $5,000 in the process.

She was romantically linked to Brit Rory Farquharson

Not long after she had started college, Malia Obama was spotted at the Harvard-Yale football game engaging in a bit of hanky panky with Rory Farquharson, a fellow classmate. While they never confirmed their relationship publicly, Farquharson’s swift deletion of his Instagram account would seem to hint that their romance was real. Indeed, the couple was seen together multiple times afterward, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Farquharson even stayed with the Obamas. Barack Obama was evidently impressed, even going so far as to describe him as a “wonderful young man.” According to a source from Rugby School, a prestigious boarding school in England that Farquharson attended from 2015 to 2016 before enrolling at Harvard, he was regarded as popular and quite the lady’s man.