Hot College Graduate: Kara DioGuardi

During the upcoming eighth season of American Idol, Grammy-nominated songwriter Kara DioGuardi will join Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson as the fourth judge on the hit television show.

According to Mike Darnell, the president of alternative programming at Fox, Kara will provide “some backup [to Paula]” and add “a lot more ‘girl power’ to the show.”

While that’s all well and good, many people are really wondering one thing: who is Kara DioGuardi?

Well, for one, she’s a Duke alumna, and in a 2007 interview with Taxi.com, she discussed her experiences as an undergraduate.

It's good to see you. It's been a few months.

You grew up in a really all-American, close-knit family—brunches every Sunday after going to church. And you come from a family of a lot of real over-achievers, so I've got to ask, did your parents freak out after you graduated from Duke with a poli-sci degree and said, "Guess what. I'm gonna be a musician"?

Yeah, they were a bit confused as to why they'd spent all that money.

How did you break the news to them?

Well, I said, "This is what I want to do." I started waitressing and I was in a garage band. They were a little taken aback by that. But what happened was that someone I went to school with moved into the area where I lived, which was Westchester, New York. She got a job at Billboard magazine, but decided to turn it down. So I thought, "Ah, if I can work in the music industry, maybe I'll do that. This'll get my parents off my back if I at least have a job, and I can work in the studio at night and do that whole thing." So, I went to work at Billboard.

I was 22. I can remember getting up at six in the morning and going to the studio until eight, then working all day, and going back to the studio every night. It was insanity. At 22, I'd never written a song, and I was looking for songs to sing so that I could shop an artist tape, and I couldn't find any. So, one day I decided that I'd have to write songs…

 

… Yeah, you must have been a terrible student to get into Duke. They take people who get C's, right?

I was an OK student, but I didn't love school because it was forced: "Read that. You'll do this or that." I was never really good with that, so this was really kind of a perfect career for me because I could feel whatever I wanted to feel, write about it, and sort of go on my own journey of finding out how to be a better writer and be more in touch with things. For me it was almost therapy in a lot of ways for what went on in my life earlier.

Amen, sister! College students can definitely relate to the feeling of being forced fed the same dull nonsense year in and year out.

All in all, it's good to know that there will finally be an educated, talented female judge on the show.