the_dunk_tank

I do not know, but what I do know is this:

A few seem to think US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked her way through college as a bartender. That is not the case. She went to college on a John F. Lopez Fellowship, because she was a highly competitive candidate. And she got regular federal student aid and loans. She has a student loan debt of somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 from going to Boston University. While at BU she was an intern in the immigration issues office for Senator Ted Kennedy.

...

Her father was an architect and they were not poor, they were middle class. Sergio Ocasio-Roman was a co-owner and CEO of an architectural practice that operated from a ground-level, 600-square-foot apartment in the 12,000-unit Parkchester condominium complex in the central Bronx.

...

Like most recent college grads in NYC in the 2010s (and in many other eras) AOC needed to cobble together a number of sources of income to make ends meet, and in this case also help her mother. You cannot afford your own apartment in NYC on the typical salary of a beginning job with just a BA. She was lucky and had her father’s paid off 725 sq ft apt. Every single person I know who moved to NYC after college had to work many jobs to make ends meet. Among those extra jobs that she had were bartending in Manhattan and waitressing at a taqueria. She says she did not go to grad school at that time, which had been her plan, because of worries about student debt and her mother’s debt.

She also did things that she dreamed of doing as a young woman just out of college. She started a publishing firm, Brook Avenue Press the year after graduation. It focused on children's literature set in the Bronx—” a social enterprise dedicated to providing relevant educational products to children and parents in urban areas.” She worked for GAGE Strategies, Inc preparing curricula teaching entrepreneurial and self-presentation skills to young college students and graduates in the Bronx. She applied to and was admitted to Sunshine Bronx, a business incubator. She got a job doing educational outreach for the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute. She worked as an organizer for Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. The next year she started her run for Congress.

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The upshot is, while it makes a fun story to say she “just worked as a bartender” after college and then was in Congress, that is not really the case. She was working at a number of things in the years 2011 to 2017. For about 5 years she worked a bunch of gigs to do things she wanted to try out and to make ends meet and to help her mom avoid foreclosure and paying off student loans. It probably did help her with voters that she had some “real world” job experiences. A large number of the people in her district work in retail or food services. Crowley never worked before being elected.

From the first good quota answer I've ever seen

It seems to be relying heavily on her own hagiography, but still gives some insight. She has been very vague about precisely for how long she worked as a bartender in that 5 year period, that somehow manages to contain a good deal of jobs that would normally raise some eyebrows, especially from a sheepdog who started out as an intern for Ted Kennedy.
On the other hand it seems like her entrance into the inner circle of politics was thru the Sanders campaign in '16.
She seems to me to have been a sort of hustling type with an eye for a good opportunity, how best to market herself and what methods to use. It doesn't seem like she was entirely without scruples nor vice versa (whip up a slice of verse pie)

The "started from the bottom" prole picture that is often painted of her, isn't really true either, and her ideology doesn't seem to have been much more than expedient opportunism, though with some sense of having a line that she wouldn't cross and wether or not her living in the Bronx and being the child of an immigrant made her sympathetic to the movements associated to those experiences, or just aware of the fertile and unworked ground... Hard to say, I'm going to say both column B and A.

Now she herself has become the type of person that is vulnerable to an opportunist like she was back then. She is mired in DC, no longer able to see what plays well and what instrument it should be played on. She is firmly removed from the environment that gave her the necessary political insights and she is no longer a hustling up-and-comer hungry for more.
But she's also firmly entrenched now, so it doesn't really matter for her anymore.

Did she realize she enjoyed being a soulless ghoul?

Or was it all just a facade from the start?

Firmly these two, it was an act from the start, but the perks of DC only further solidified her true character

I think she honestly believed she could “work with” the party leadership to move them and the last six years have been her going deeper and deeper into sunk cost bias.

that last one

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

It was a facade and she has simply adapted her approach from milquetoast gadfly to overt sheepdog for the party.