Six weeks before she was set to graduate from England’s University of Oxford, Katie Wilson dropped out.

It was 2004 and Wilson, 43, now the leading candidate for Seattle’s next mayor, had hoped Oxford would quash her doubts about academia. But she instead found the careerism and party culture she’d hoped to avoid.

Following a trip to Indonesia to witness the exploits of BP oil, she quit after nearly three years of pursuing a degree in physics and philosophy.

Coming next Sunday Bruce Harrell touts progress and promises stability in his quest for re-election.

“I want to go and find out what the real world is all about, and I’m going to plunge in and burn a bridge so that I really have to do that,” she said of her thinking at the time, while eating a piece of toast in her one-bedroom Capi

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