Did You Know the President of Iceland Went to this Evansville High School?

 Did You Have Third Period with the President of Iceland?

If you went to Central High School in 1986-87, you probably ate lunch in the cafeteria with the current President of Iceland. That's right: Before Halla Tómasdóttir was elected President of Iceland, she went to school right here in Evansville. As a foreign exchange student, she participated in musicals and was elected to the homecoming court. In the past few years, she even returned to Evansville for Thanksgiving and was in the wedding of her "sister" from her Evansville host family.

Highly Educated Before Political Career

Halla graduated from Central with the class of 1987 and then headed south and graduated from Auburn University in 1993. Her degree was in business administration with an emphasis on management and human resources. As most presidents are highly educated, Tomasdottir's education did not stop at Auburn. She went on to earn her Master of Business Administration degree from the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University in 1995. After college, she went on to be a founding member of Reykjavik University in Iceland and co-founder of an investment firm before becoming the chief executive of a global non-profit known as The B Team. The non-profit was a collection of various society leaders with a common interest in focusing business practices around humanity and the climate. In 2016, she turned her mission to Icelandic politics.

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What Being President of Iceland Entails Politically

The President of Iceland is considered a ceremonial position, although formal constitutional powers such as signing bills and formally appointing new governments and their ministers are still listed in the job description. In Iceland, the President is known as the Forseti, or one who sits foremost, meaning they are not involved in the running of the country, but serve as a comparable head of state. The term length is four years by popular vote, with no term limit. She first ran in 2016 and lost to then-President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, before running again in 2024 and defeating him. During her 2024 campaign, she won with a focus on the effects of social media on our children's mental health, tourism development, and artificial intelligence.

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