"She was interested in adult issues from the time she was very, very small," Gardiner's mother says. "If we were having an adult party, she would be in the doorway listening to what was going on."

Gardiner's younger sister Kate says Avery was rarely rebellious. She got in trouble once in high school for taking issue with federal policy.

"She was sent to the principal's office in high school because she refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance," Kate says. "It was during the Gulf War, and she didn't believe in what the country was doing."

Gardiner made her mark in Augusta politics during her first and second years of high school, while also serving as class president. She took on the city council over school budget cuts.

"It was pretty drastic. They were cutting busing, cutting all extracurriculars, no field trips, no new textbooks," she says. "My sister, when she was a freshman in high school, learned about the Soviet Union, which was not then the Soviet Union. But that's what the book said."

Gardiner spoke at city council and school board meetings and invited the city councillors to Cony High School for the day.

"Only one of them took me up on the offer, but I showed him around the school and told him how we really needed the money and how it was important," she says. "And I got myself in the paper."

She also made quite an impact on the community.

"There was a state legislator by the name of Dan Hickey, a wonderful man, and I helped on his reelection campaign one year," Gardiner says. "Because I had so much publicity during this city council fight,...they asked me to do an endorsement. They ran a political ad with my smiling face. I couldn't even vote for him!"

Education is one of the issues Gardiner says she'd like to tackle in her career. While others have political aspirations for her, she herself says she's interested in formulating public policy.

She does, though, she admit that the positions of mayor of Boston or state governor are appealing.

Gardiner says she's interested in matters of "social equity": fighting crime, balancing work and family and working for women's rights.

Those who know her say Gardiner really is interested in issues and not only political power.

"Avery is just so interested in ideas, interested in what's happening in the world," her mother says.

At Harvard, she has focused on extracurriculars involving politics and government. She was a member of Model Congress and taught middle school kids in Dorchester as part of the Harvard Program for International Education. In 1996, she served as chair of the IOP's Student Advisory Committee.