Markle and Thomas Markle Jr. Growing up in Los Angeles, Markle attended Hollywood Little Red Schoolhouse. Both her parents contributed to raising her until the age of 9, after which her father was left in charge of caring for her as her mother pursued a career. At age 11, she and her classmates wrote to Procter & Gamble to gender-neutralize a dishwashing soap commercial on national television. She was raised as a Protestant but graduated from L.A.'s Immaculate Heart High School, an all-girl Catholic school. Markle took part in plays and musicals at the school, where her father helped with lighting. During her teenage years, she worked at a local frozen yogurt shop and later as a waitress and babysitter. She also volunteered at a soup kitchen in Skid Row, Los Angeles. In 1999, she was admitted to Northwestern University (NU) in Evanston, Illinois, where she joined Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. With other members of Kappa Kappa Gamma, Markle did volunteer work with the Glass Slipper Project. After her junior year, she secured an internship as a junior press officer at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, with the help of her uncle Michael Markle, and considered a political career. However, she did not score high enough in the Foreign Service Officer Test to proceed further with the US State Department, and returned to NU. She also attended a study abroad program in Madrid. In 2003, Markle earned her bachelor's degree with a double major in theater and international studies from Northwestern's School of Communication. Acting career According to Markle, she had some difficulty getting roles early in her career due to being "ethnically ambiguous" because "I wasn't black enough for the black roles and I wasn't white enough for the white ones." To support herself between acting jobs, she worked as a freelance calligrapher and taught bookbinding. Her first on-screen appearance was a small role as a nurse in an episode of the daytime soap opera General Hospital, a show for which her father served as a lighting director. Markle had small guest roles on the television shows Century City (2004), The War at Home (2006) and CSI: NY (2006). For her role in Century City, she told the casting directors that she was a SAG-AFTRA member when she was not, but after being cast, the employers were obliged to help her join the union according to the Taft–Hartley