Usha Vance Is Unrecognizable In High School Yearbook Photo

For better or worse, most of us look a bit different today than we did in our high school yearbook photo. This is also the case for Vice President JD Vance's wife, Usha Vance. Her yearbook photo was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, and seeing it just proves that she was once a totally normal high school student before she went on to become the second lady. 

My daughter Amanda graduated from Mt. Carmel in San Diego in 2002. She pulled out her yearbook and this is Usha Chilukuri in 11th grade. She graduated in 2003. Usha is married to JD Vance. In high school, she was in the marching band, national honors society, and the link crew. pic.twitter.com/jS4aZn8iut

— Tommy Sablan (@tommysablan) July 18, 2024

One X user took to the platform to share a special find: the second lady's 11th grade photo in his daughter's old yearbook from Mt. Carmel High School in San Diego, California. According to the caption, Usha graduated in 2003, and while in school, she was a member of the marching band, National Honors Society, and Link Crew (a student leadership program). It doesn't come as much of a surprise that Usha was seemingly an ambitious yet down-to-earth teenager. It is, however, surprising to see how she's changed and how much of a style transformation she's had over the course of the past two decades. At the Vice Presidential Dinner in January 2025, Usha made her DC debut, and her strapless designer gown gave Melania Trump a run for her money, making it clear that she's transitioned into the much more glamorous life of a second lady since her days in the marching band.

While there were some mixed reactions to seeing Usha Vance's yearbook photo, most users were excited to get a glimpse into her past. "Just a winner," one X-user noted. Another commenter was able to see how 11th grade Usha would one day transform into the second lady, writing, "She has always been pretty."

Usha is fairly new to the public eye, which understandably piques folks' curiosity about who she really is. For obvious reasons, one of the biggest questions in peoples' minds is about Usha's marriage to JD Vance. Interestingly, it seems that Usha's ambitious high school career may have put her on the path to meeting her future husband. 

After graduating high school, she went to Yale University. She graduated in 2007 with a BA in history, which led her to later attend Yale Law School, where she met JD. JD and Usha's first time meeting was clearly special. They were partnered up for an assignment, and JD gushed about being immediately impressed by her in his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy." "She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly," he wrote about Usha, calling her "a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful." And getting a glimpse into Usha's younger years makes it easy to see why JD thought she was special so quickly.