Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus. When she was two, she learned how to figure skate, but later quit and started playing ice hockey. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and was an Editor for The Oracle, the school newspaper, and won a scholarship for her Sports stories. She attended Yale University, where she was a competitive ice skater and played on the varsity women's ice hockey team. She graduated with a B.S. in biology in 1996. She did molecular biology research at the National Institutes of Health and the University of California, San Diego.