Fox news maya shankar1/14/2024 Despite not speaking a word of English on her arrival and facing many other barriers, she somehow managed to graduate as the valedictorian of her high school and get a full ride to Yale. Her family’s circus was bought by Barnum & Bailey when she was 8, and so she and her family moved to New Jersey. My freshman year suitemate grew up in a circus family in Kazhakstan, where she performed the Hula-hoops. I remember being amazed by just how fascinating my Yalie classmates were. Spending what felt like endless amounts of time with my suitemates and friends. I'm learning Mandarin right now and let me tell you, it is super tough! I would've studied abroad and really deepened my ability to speak a second language. If you could relive your time at Yale, what would you do differently? So I’m on the receiving end of her amazing mentorship as I embark on this new pursuit! I'm collaborating with Malcolm Gladwell's production company, which is also where Laurie built her incredibly successful podcast, The Happiness Lab. And the stars have aligned once again: I just launched a new podcast called “A Slight Change of Plans” – a show all about how people, like Hillary Clinton and Tiffany Haddish, have navigated extraordinary change in their lives. Having Laurie Santos as my undergraduate mentor and getting to conduct research in her non-human primate lab! She’s a dear friend of mine to this day and has given me life-changing advice at so many crucial points in my career. What is the most enduring memory of your time at Yale? This most busy alumna found some time recently to talk with us about reconnecting with Laurie Santos, trying out an industrial-grade hula hoop, what alum most inspires her, what Mark Twain got right about Yale’s campus, and more! And she is now the senior director of behavioral economics at Google and the creator, host, and executive producer of her own podcast, “A Slight Change of Plans.” She was a senior advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the White House’s Behavioral Science Team before serving as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations. She was a distinguished scholar at Yale, a Rhodes Scholar who earned her PhD from Oxford, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. She was a former private violin student of Itzhak Perlman and a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music’s pre-college division. "You can listen to episodes in any order and at any time.Maya Shankar has lived many lives. "What I love most about this show is that the content is evergreen," says Shankar. The show also explores the science of change with experts like Adam Grant and Angela Duckworth. You’ll hear intimate conversations with people like Tiffany Haddish, Kacey Musgraves, and Riz Ahmed, as well as real-life inspirations, like John Elder Robison, who undergoes experimental brain stimulation to deepen his emotional intelligence, Daryl Davis, a Black jazz musician who inspires hundreds of KKK members to leave the Klan, and Shankar herself, who had her own “slight change of plans” earlier this year. Her insights into human behavior ultimately led her to create A Slight Change of Plans-Apple Podcasts’ Best Show of the Year in 2021. “I was forced to try and figure out who I was, and who I could be, without the violin." Maya soon discovered a new path in the field of cognitive science, where she earned her PhD as a Rhodes Scholar studying how and why we change. “My whole childhood revolved around the violin, but that changed in a moment when I injured my hand playing a single note,” says Shankar, who was studying under Itzhak Perlman at the Juilliard School at the time. Apple Podcasts’ Best Show of the Year 2021 Editor's Note: Maya Shankar blends compassionate storytelling with the science of human behavior to help us understand who we are and who we become in the face of a big change.
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