Hillary Clinton has gotten surprisingly candid in an interview with photographer Brandon Stanton for his hugely popular blog, Humans of New York.

Clinton, who is running as the Democratic candidate in the US presidential election, posed for Stanton’s camera and shared an upsetting story from her time at Harvard Law School.

“I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room,” Clinton recalled.

“And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And, ‘there’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on’.

“One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around.”

The former US Secretary of State related her response to this uncomfortable situation to her approach to the election in general.

“[I] couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room,” Clinton explained.

“I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off’.”

The 68-year-old also made an effort to differentiate herself from predecessors like Barack Obama and her husband, Bill Clinton.

“I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not Bill Clinton. Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences. But I’m married to one and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural,” Clinton said.

“It’s not something they just dial in. They work and they practice what they’re going to say. It’s not that they’re trying to be somebody else.

“You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens.”

“I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’ Which is funny, because I’m always convinced that the people in the front row are loving it.”

On Facebook Clinton’s photos and quotes have collectively received nearly 700,000 likes and thousands of comments, mostly in support of her honesty.

President Obama has also been featured on the popular page, which was started by Stanton in 2010 as a photography project but soon gained global attention for its touching, frank portrayal of humanity on the streets of New York City.

It remains to be seen whether Republican candidate Donald Trump will take the plunge too.