Word: ben-shachar
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...defining element of these four years, says Ben-Shachar, has been personal friendships, not academics. "From the outset...I realized that this was the most important resource Harvard had to offer. So my first priority was meeting people.... The friendships [with which I am leaving] Harvard are the most important things I gained from Harvard...
...Ben-Shachar's favorite memories took place at the end of his first year, by which time he was 22 years old. He and some friends from his dormitory, Massachusetts Hall, had returned from a night out on the Square. Amidst peals of laughter and pun-peppered conversation (puns are another Ben-Shachar passion), one friend "suddenly stopped. She looked at me very seriously and intensely, and she said to me, 'Tal, you have really immatured.'" Ben-Shachar says his immaturity process is never-ending, though he hopes it is not infinitely regressive...
...Ben-Shachar began Harvard as a computer science concentrator and as a "perfectionist," which, he explains, he distinguishes from his current ideal of excellence. After brief stints with economics, cognitive science, history, math, applied math and various combinations of all those with psychology, he is graduating with a double concentration in philosophy and psychology...
...Ben-Shachar says his experience is testimony to the virtues of two of Harvard's most notoriously unpopular programs: Expository Writing and the Core Curriculum. Professor Stanley Cavell's Moral Reasoning core, Moral Perfectionism, inspired him to study philosophy. This was already a nascent interest: During his first year at Harvard, Ben-Shachar founded the campus Objectivist Club, but by his sophomore year he no longer ran it. Now he doesn't considers himself an Objectivist, noting the irony that Ayn Rand's highly individualist philosophy spawns "blind commitment" from her ideological "followers...
Maxine Rodberg's Expos class turned him on to writing, which is curently his "greatest passion." Ben-Shachar, who is a Crimson editor, has had his editorials published not only on the pages of The Crimson, but also in Israeli newspapers Ha'aretz and Ma'ariv. He plans to convert his thesis, "Honesty Pays," a psychological and philosophical defense of what he believes is indeed the best policy, into a book for "what philosophers would call the 'ordinary...