Michelle Wu is, by conventional standards, an unlikely figure to be challenging a sitting Boston mayor (though incumbent Mayor Marty Walsh has yet to declare his candidacy, he is widely expected to seek a third term next year). She is shy by temperament, and when she entered Harvard as an undergraduate in 2004, politics was so removed from Wu’s upbringing that she considered herself neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

But our conversation with Wu on The Codcast, focused more on getting to know her than on details of campaign policy points, reveals how various strands of her family history, childhood, and college years, even if removed from formal involvement in politics, connect in ways that make a future in public service not that unlikely after all.