In a 1998 interview with Harvard Crimson, Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto talked about how her time as an undergraduate at Harvard 25 years earlier helped shape her political development and belief in democracy.

The two-time prime minister and current opposition leader was assassinated Thursday after a campaign rally, just one month before elections.

Her “determination to see freedom in my own country, to see rule of law, to see democratic institutions, was born in that period of great intellectual ferment at Harvard,” she said of her time at Harvard during the height of the anti-war and feminist movements.

Known as “Pinkie” to classmates, the daughter of the Pakistani president enjoyed her anonymity. “It was a time of immense freedom, a time of immense privacy and a time when I was accepted for being me and not because I was the daughter of somebody, the mother of somebody, the sister of somebody,” she recalled.