It's the dream of every smart student in the USA or the UK to attend either an Ivy League school, or England's Oxford or Cambridge University. It takes a real show off to do both, but Ellie Kemper wasn't going to let that put her off. She was an excellent school student, but quite by chance her high school drama teacher was an aspiring actor himself. It was Jon Hamm. Hamm ignited Kemper's interest in comedy and performance, and so she set off in his footsteps.
She majored in English at Princeton, where she also enjoyed her time in the university's improv comedy troupe 'Quipfire'. Not content with that, she then moved to England and studied the same subject at Oxford, working towards a graduate degree. That probably makes her more qualified in English than almost any teacher in the world.