In July, Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential candidate to be nominated by a major American political party. If the polls hold true, today she will become the president-elect, marking a drastic shift in the face of American politics.

Her path to success was not easy, though, and it started in Chicago. Raised in Park Ridge, a near northwest suburb of the city, the political scene here had a profound impact on her career.

“To see firsthand how beautiful the city looks and how much opportunity and optimism, challenges to be sure, really mark this great city,” she said on-stage at a Chicago Ideas Talk in 2014 (a year before she announced her presidential run).

In 2008, she lost the Democratic presidential nomination to then-Senator Barack Obama, who also cut his political teeth in Chicago. During Obama’s first term as president, she became Secretary of State and would go onto work closely with Rahm Emaneul, who was tapped as the president’s Chief of Staff and would later leave the White House to become Chicago’s mayor.

“I was the most surprised person on Earth when, after the election, then president-elect Obama called me and said he wanted to see me,” Clinton says. “He said, ‘I need you to be out traveling the world, making the case for renewing American leadership.'”

From her time as First Lady in both Arkansas and the White House to her time as a Senator in New York to her term as Secretary of State, Clinton’s Chicago connection has proved her to be a great collaborator. One can get a great sense of this in her Talk above. Even though she had not yet declared her presidential candidacy, Clinton was certainly laying the groundwork for the type of administration that she would run.