Conan O'Brien

"...although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. ... I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshman Face book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records ... I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds. Recently, I had some structural engineers run those numbers into a computer model and, according to the computer, I collapsed in 1987, killing hundreds in Taiwan." — Conan O’Brien, 2000 Harvard Class Day Speech


His father, Dr. Thomas O’Brien, was a research physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, specializing in infectious diseases. His mother, Ruth Reardon O’Brien, is a former partner of the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray

After graduating as the valedictorian from Brookline High School (Brookline, Massachusetts), O’Brien entered Harvard University.

Throughout his college career, he was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine.

During his sophomore and junior years, O’Brien served as the Lampoon's president, making him only the second person ever to serve as president twice, and the first person to have done it in 85 years.

He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1985 with a concentration in History and Literature.

-if you watch his show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, you might never know who the guy really is. except maybe as a writer for a school paper..