According to Marie Claire, Lady Gaga was accepted into the Collaborative Arts Project 21 music school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts when she was 17 years old. During her studies she lived in an NYU dorm; however, she eventually dropped out of the university during the second semester of her sophomore year to pursue a career in music. Gaga told New York Magazine that "once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself," so she left NYU to become a rock star. 

Lady Gaga's decision to quit college came at a time when she was beginning to get attention from major record labels and producers. In 2006, the decision paid off when she was signed to Def Jam Records. At the height of her monumental pop music debut in 2009, a video of the Grammy Award winner performing at New York University came to light. The clip has since amassed more than 7 million views on YouTube, and shows exactly what she knew all along, despite the bullying from her classmates — she was born to be famous.