Being the daughter of two entertainment industry moguls: Peggy Lipton and Quincy Jones, Rashida Jones had big shoes to fill. Luckily for her, she inherited her parents’ talent and intellect, and she has made a name for herself in her own right.
Before she became a hit in Parks and Recreation and The Office, she graduated from Harvard with a degree in comparative religion. She was quite an active member of her university, as she was a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club and also the musical director of an a cappella group called the Harvard Opportunes.
Oprah Winfrey Has a Degree in Communication
Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential women in media, won an oratory contest which got her a "full-ride" at Tennessee State University, a historically black college, where she majored in communication.
Winfrey's close and friends and family were certainly not surprised by her career choice. She once told an interviewer how her grandmother once said that ever since Winfrey could speak, she was "on stage".
Would You Want Gerard Butler to Be Your Lawer?
Before he became a Spartan, Butler obtained a law degree from the University of Glasgow. After graduation, he was a trainee lawyer at a big firm but because he was quite the party animal at the time, he would often miss work, and subsequently got fired just one week before he'd become a qualified lawyer. Butler already realized that being a lawyer wasn't his true passion, and although he wasn't is what direction he would take, he was sure of one thing, he wanted to be famous.
At the age of 25 at he made the decision to move to London to pursue a career in acting, and at 30 he moves to Los Angeles, and the rest is history.
Uzo Aduba Has a Degree In Voice Performance
Uzo Aduba, better known as "Crazy Eyes" on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, received critical acclaim, including an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and if that wasn't impressive enough, she has two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series.
Aduba obtained a degree in Voice Performance from Boston University’s School of Music, where she also ran on Track and Feild team. In 2017 she returned to her old college to give the commencement address saying, "It wasn’t so long ago that I was waking up at 7:50 in the morning in West Campus and making my way down to [the College of Fine Arts] for an 8 a.m. ear training and sight-reading class." What an inspiration!
John Cho Majored in English
John Cho is famous for his role as Harold Lee in the Harold & Kumar film franchise. Many may not know that he made history in the industry as the first Asian-American actor to headline a mainstream thriller film, and then he made history again when he starred as Henry Higgs in American sitcom Selfie, making him the first Asian American actor cast as a romantic lead.
Before breaking barrier, Cho earned a degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley, and coincidently, that's also where his interest in acting sparked. Cho once recalled how it all started in an interview "I was in this writing group and this fellow in it was directing a play...He literally said, 'How tall are you and what do you weigh?' I think somebody got sick and he needed to know if I fit the costume. It was really like two lines."