 In 1928 Weil began her studies at the École Normale. She was the only woman in her class, the first woman having been first admitted in 1917. In 1929–1930 she worked on her dissertation on knowledge and perception in Descartes, and having received her agrégation diploma, she served from late 1931 to mid-1934 as a teacher at lycées. Throughout this period, outside of her duties at each lycée where she instructed professionally, Weil taught philosophy to, lobbied for, and wrote on behalf of workers’ groups; at times, moreover, she herself joined in manual labor. In her early thinking she prized at once the first-person perspective and radical skepticism of Descartes, the class-based solidarity and materialist analysis of Marx, and the moral absolutism and respect for the individual of Kant. Drawing from each, her early work can be read as an attempt to provide, with a view toward liberty, her own analysis of the fundamental causes of oppression in society.