I wrote this as an op-ed but looking at it again, it’s not opinionated enough. Posting this here while working on a new version in a hurry ahead of Super Tuesday. (Update: here’s the final version on Medium, Why I’m Voting for Elizabeth Warren.)

Knowing I was about to face Elizabeth Warren, a notoriously tough teacher, I stayed up late doing the assigned homework for my first day of her bankruptcy law class in fall 2006. I heard she could make unprepared students cry.

But she told us to put our books away. That first day, before we started studying the intricacies of the law, she wanted us to know why it mattered.

For the next hour, Warren talked to us about the precarious financial situation of most American families. She said she used to think of debt as a failure of personal responsibility – instead of charging up their credit cards with designer clothes, debtors should tighten their belts and eat beans at home. When she did the research, her findings shocked her. The facts showed that most people declared bankruptcy due to medical problems, unexpected job losses, or family crises like divorces or deaths in the family: ordinary human tragedies compounded by financial insecurity. We should care about bankruptcy, she said, because too many American families lived on a financial precipice. They deserved better.

Her words resonated during my Legal Aid internship. My classmates and I helped people with mortgages they could no longer afford, a veteran whose health expenses pushed him into bankruptcy, and a woman saddled with credit card debt racked up by a family member who stole her identity. I saw banks and credit card companies profiting off our clients’ desperation.

Even then, years before she ran for any office, Elizabeth Warren had a plan for that. She talked to us about consumer protection, Glass-Steagall, and subprime mortgage lending. Over a year before the crash of 2008, she was sounding the alarm bells, testifying before Congress and trying to get people to pay attention to the coming foreclosure crisis.

The rest of the semester, Warren lived up to her reputation as a formidable teacher. She knew the complex laws backward and forward, and expected the same from us. When I dozed off in class a few times, exhausted from my second trimester of pregnancy, I feared her reaction. But she let it go. I wondered if it was because she remembered being pregnant with her son, Alex, when she was a law student herself.

A few years later, I heard Warren speak to a group of women lawyers. She talked about her recent work, serving in the FDIC’s Commission on Economic Inclusion in Washington and making plans for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and how her life had led up to it: growing up in Oklahoma, marrying at 19, raising her children while working and going back to school, and now dividing her time between her grandchildren and Washington, D.C. Seeing her out on the sidewalk later, I approached her even though I’m terrible at talking to people I admire. I blurted out something embarrassing about how I loved her speech and her class. I expected her to smile and say thank you without slowing her stride. But she stopped and asked me questions about my life. She asked to see a photo of my toddler. I confessed that I found it hard to juggle my legal career with a small child. She encouraged me to pursue what I felt was important – career, family, public service. She said it would be hard, but worth it.

Elizabeth Warren the presidential candidate is the same person I met years ago, when she was Elizabeth Warren the teacher. She listens. She admits when she’s wrong. She’s still out there talking about financial stability for working families. She’s still drawing on her decades of expertise in economic policy to come up with concrete plans, and talking about them to anyone who will listen. And most of all, even though she could be reclining in her tenured chair and retiring at the height of her career, she’s not taking the easy path. She’s still out there fighting.