Even his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was partly the outgrowth of a paper he wrote in a Yale class. And he leveraged the story, which chronicles his childhood and the alienation of the working class, into a bestseller, a movie deal, and a political career — winning election to the US Senate in 2022, at age 38.

Despite Yale’s transformative role in his life, Vance’s relationship with the school could be summed up as conflicted.

Graduating from Yale was “the coolest thing” he had ever done, “at least on paper,” he wrote in his memoir. But he also portrayed himself as an outsider who flubbed law firm interviews and was baffled when asked whether he preferred chardonnay or sauvignon blanc — he had never heard of either. And his classmates remember his sarcasm and cynicism when discussing what he thought of as the school’s liberal bubble.

Recently, he has adopted a more oppositional tone, taking on tax breaks for top universities. “Elite universities have become expensive day care centers for coddled children,” he wrote on social media.

A close look at Vance’s record at Yale, though, shows that he adapted rapidly, taking advantage of the school’s heady social and academic opportunities. He cooked for charity fundraisers; organized reading groups; doted on his German shepherd, Casper; and led The Yale Law Journal’s flag football team. He spent a summer working on Capitol Hill.

Many students and professors remember Vance as warm, personable, and even charismatic. But several also said they were perplexed by what they saw as Vance’s profound ideological shift. They understood that he was conservative politically, but they viewed him as a Republican in the mold of John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Now, they say that he has abandoned his Never Trumper principles, taking hard lines against immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, positions they believe he would not have previously embraced.

Sofia Nelson, a former classmate who is transgender and was once a close friend of both Vance and his wife, recalled that Vance delivered home-baked treats when they underwent top surgery. But years of friendship ended in 2021 over his support for an Arkansas bill opposing transgender care for minors.

“It hurt my feelings when he started saying hateful things about trans people,” they said.

Another classmate, Josh McLaurin, no longer talks to him, either.

As apartment-mates during their first year at Yale, McLaurin felt an affinity for Vance because they had both graduated from state schools. But their friendship began to fray, McLaurin said, after he chafed at what he viewed as Vance’s cynical and sarcastic jokes aimed at Yale elites.

Even so, the two stayed in touch after graduating in 2013. As the Republican presidential primaries were underway in February 2016, Vance discussed his dislike for Trump in a Facebook message. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote.

McLaurin, disturbed by Vance’s shift to support Trump, disclosed that message in 2022, during Vance’s campaign for US Senate.

“He realized that the only way that he could realize and give effect to his own anger in politics was to identify with the MAGA movement,” said McLaurin, who is a Democratic state senator in Georgia.

In his memoir, Vance describes arriving at Yale, feeling like an “awe-struck tourist.”

“Yale Law, with its prestige and privilege, was a culture shock unlike anything I had ever experienced,” he wrote.

But he developed a cadre of confidantes in a class of about 15 students assigned to remain together through the first semester. In his book, Vance describes his closest friends in that group as “misfit toys.”

In addition to Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit, the group included his future wife, Usha Chilukuri, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and Jamil Jivani, a Canadian from a mixed-race family. (Jivani, now a Conservative member of Canada’s Parliament, remains a close friend to Vance but would not comment for this article.)

Some who observed Vance in the group recall how he at first struggled with assignments. And his book describes comments he got that first year: “Not good at all,” one professor wrote. And on another paper: “This is a vomit of sentences masquerading as a paragraph. Fix.”

Amy Chua, a professor who taught his first-year contracts class, recalled in an interview that he scored near the top of 100 students on the exam, and that he admitted he had studied extra hard for the test.

It appeared, even to Chua, she said, that he lacked the intense interest in law exhibited by some students.

Vance won a spot on the staff of The Yale Law Journal — a prestigious position that is often a steppingstone to a coveted appellate court clerkship — but not as one of its top editors. He instead worked with a group of editors whose primary job was to check citations.

One major influence at Yale, he has said, was a 2011 talk by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist known for cofounding PayPal and supporting hard-right political candidates.

Thiel spoke about elite professionals trapped in hypercompetitive but unrewarding jobs while innovation had stalled.

Vance would later write that the talk led him to forgo a law career; he would practice for less than two years.

“Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote. “He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se — not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition.”

Inspired, Vance decided to track down the billionaire, according to Dan Driscoll, one of a small group of fellow veterans at Yale Law.

“I remember sitting at the kitchen table,” Driscoll said. “We Googled ‘Peter Thiel @’ for about two hours.” They finally located a Stanford University email address, and Vance sent him a note, according to Driscoll.

“Peter wrote back and said, ‘Stop by my house next time you’re out here,’” said Driscoll, a businessperson who ran for Congress from North Carolina in 2022 as a Republican.

Thiel would become a major supporter of both Vance’s venture capital firm and his Senate campaign.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.