As a young adult, Obama moved to the contiguous United States, where he was educated at Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.

In Chicago, Obama worked at various times as a community organizer, lawyer, lecturer and senior Lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School in the city's South Side, and later published his memoir Dreams from My Father before beginning his political career in 1997 as a member of the Illinois Senate.

[4][11][12][13] Ann Dunham returned with her son to Honolulu and in January 1963 resumed her undergraduate education at the University of Hawaii.

[15] He was one year into his American experience, after two semesters on the Manoa campus and a summer on the mainland at Northwestern and the University of Wisconsin, when he encountered Dunham, then an undergraduate interested in anthropology.

[22] The family initially lived in a newly built neighborhood in the Menteng Dalam administrative village of the Tebet subdistrict in South Jakarta for two and a half years, while Soetoro worked on a topographic survey for the Indonesian government.

[23] Obama's mother met a transgender person named Evie (who was known as Trudi at the time), at a cocktail party in 1969.

It did not take long before Evie was also caretaker for then eight-year-old "Barry", as Obama was often referred to as then, and his baby sister Maya.

[4][23][27][28][29][30] From January 1970 to August 1972, Obama's mother taught English and was a department head and a director of the Institute of Management Education and Development.

[31] In the summer of 1970, Obama returned to Hawaii for an extended visit with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham.

[33] In mid-1971, Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend Punahou School starting in fifth grade.

[38] After three years in Hawaii, she and Maya returned to Jakarta in August 1975,[39] where Dunham completed her contract with the Institute of Management Education and Development and started anthropological fieldwork.

[42] Of his early childhood, Obama writes: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.

[44] Obama was also a member of the "choom gang", a self-named group of friends that spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana.

At the Saddleback Civil Presidential Forum, Barack Obama identified his high-school drug use as his greatest moral failure.

Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.

[50] He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a speciality in international relations[51][52] and in English literature.

In an interview with Ebony in 1990, he stated that he saw a degree in law as a vehicle to facilitate better community organization and activism: "The idea was not only to get people to learn how to hope and dream about different possibilities, but to know how the tax structure affects what kind of housing gets built where.

[67] Also during his law school years, Obama spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course on Alinsky methods of organizing.

[64] The publicity from his election as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations.

[68] In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book.

[68] He married Michelle in 1992[69] and settled down with her in Hyde Park, a liberal, integrated, middle-class Chicago neighborhood with a history of electing reform-minded politicians independent of the Daley political machine.

Marty Nesbitt, a young, successful black businessman (who played basketball with Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson), became Obama's best friend and introduced him to other African-American business people.

[59] Obama directed Illinois Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive, officially nonpartisan, that helped Carol Moseley Braun become the first black woman ever elected to the Senate.

[59] He headed up a staff of 10 and 700 volunteers that achieved its goal of 400,000 registered African Americans in the state, leading Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.

[72][73][74] Although fundraising was not required for the position when Obama was recruited for the job, he started an active campaign to raise money for the project.

"[74] The fundraising brought Obama into contact with the wealthy, liberal elite of Chicago, some of whom became supporters in his future political career.

[56] In 1995, Obama also announced his candidacy for a seat in the Illinois state Senate and attended Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in Washington, DC.