Haines Hall
The two years that President Barack Obama spent at Occidental College had a profound impact on his life. It was as a member of Occidental’s Class of 1983 that he first began to take the world of books and ideas seriously, and was awakened to the notion that he could make a difference in the world. The classes he took, the lasting relationships he formed with professors and friends, and his experiences outside of the classroom all helped shape the person he was to become. As he says, Oxy “started giving me a sense of what a purposeful life might look like.”
During his freshman year at Occidental, Obama lived in Room A103 of Haines Hall—a triple he shared with Paul Carpenter ’83, a political science major from Claremont, and Imad Husain ’83, an economics major from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “We had a really good hallway; there were a lot of interesting folks,” says Carpenter, whose family hosted Obama for Thanksgiving. “Barack was funny, smart, thoughtful, and well-liked,” says Phil Boerner ’83, who lived across the hall. “It was easy to sit down with him and have a fun conversation.”