Twist Of Fate Leads Musical Prodigy To Pursue Social Sciences

Maya Shankar was on her way to being an accomplished concert violinist, but a twist of fate led her to the social sciences instead.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Life often requires improvisation, especially when things don't go according to plan. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam brings us the story of one woman who's had to reinvent herself again and again.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Maya Shankar remembers exactly how she felt when her mom first put a violin in her hands.

MAYA SHANKAR: I was immediately taken kind of by the tactile sensation of the instrument. I just loved the feeling of playing the violin.

VEDANTAM: Maya practiced constantly. She got good, very good. The music you're hearing in this piece is Maya performing at age 12.

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VEDANTAM: Her mother wanted to find a teacher who could take her to the next level. So one day when they were in New York, they stopped by Juilliard, the famous performing arts school - just walked in, no appointment.

SHANKAR: We happened to run into a student in the elevator, and my mom talked to that family and said, would you mind if we just had about five or 10 minutes at the end of your lesson where Maya could play for your teacher? And they were really gracious, and they said, sure, no problem.

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VEDANTAM: Maya played for the other student's music teacher, and she got accepted into a summer program. Soon she was taking classes at Juilliard. She was talented, hard-working. The path before her seemed clear.

SHANKAR: I really wanted to be a violinist. I was so passionate about it. I never felt more comfortable than when I was performing.

VEDANTAM: One day when Maya was 15, she was practicing at Itzhak Perlman's Shelter Island campus at the eastern edge of Long Island.

SHANKAR: I was playing a passage from a very challenging Paganini Caprice.

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SHANKAR: And I simply overstretched my finger on one note, and I felt like kind of a popping.

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SHANKAR: I overstretched the tendon, and it didn't really heal as expected.

VEDANTAM: It never did heal properly. Doctors finally told her she had to stop playing completely. Just like that, Maya's dream to become a concert violinist was over.

SHANKAR: I was really devastated to lose something that I was completely in love with and so passionate about and that had really constituted such a large part of my life and my identity. You know, I was first and foremost a violinist.

VEDANTAM: Back home for the summer in Connecticut, she started to ask herself, would she ever find anything that could make her as happy as the violin?

SHANKAR: This was the summer before college. And just by luck, I was helping my parents clean their basement in Cheshire, Conn., and I stumbled upon an old course book of my sister's. It was called "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.

VEDANTAM: Maya started reading, and the more she read, the more excited she became.

SHANKAR: It really wet my appetite for learning more about the mind and for exploring in more depth kind of the brilliance of the brain.

VEDANTAM: She started to study cognitive science, went on to get her Ph.D. at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. She got a postdoctoral fellowship. A promising career in academia lay ahead of her. But here again came another unexpected turn.

SHANKAR: So over Thanksgiving break of the final year of my postdoc, I was visiting my undergraduate adviser from college. She was telling me about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's efforts to get free and reduced-price lunches into the hands of more eligible students.

VEDANTAM: Students were going hungry because the process of getting certified for the lunch program was cumbersome. The Department of Agriculture came up with a simple idea. Instead of having a multistep sign-up system, states could use information they already had about poor families to help enroll children in the lunch program.

SHANKAR: It's just a matter of data matching and cross-enrolling these students. But as a result of this common sense reform, you know, 12.4 million students had access to lunches and were able to thrive at school. And I remember being so moved by this example.

VEDANTAM: To Maya, it was just magical.

SHANKAR: It was just like a light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, OK, this is what I need to be doing with my life.

VEDANTAM: She tracked down an email address for Thomas Kalil, who was helping the Obama administration with its science policy.

SHANKAR: I sent Tom a cold email (laughter). Like...

VEDANTAM: This is the Juilliard method.

SHANKAR: This is the Juilliard - this is my mom's Juilliard. I get to give her full credit for this. She is totally fearless. But cold-emailed him, and he asked me to pitch to him ideas that I had around interventions where behavioral science could improve public policy outcomes.

VEDANTAM: Maya ended up joining the White House. She was asked to put together a team that could marshal ideas from social science research and apply them to public policy challenges.

One problem she and her team have worked on was to ensure that kids who've been accepted to college actually go to college. Lots of them don't. They miss deadlines. They don't show up on the first day of school. The idea that Maya and her team came up with - send the students eight text messages reminding them of impending deadlines.

SHANKAR: What we found was a 9 percent increase in college enrollment rates as a result of eight text messages. I mean that is really profound. Eight text messages is what I send my best friend (laughter) on any given day, and that can make the difference between a college-accepted student showing up on day one ready to learn or not going to college.

VEDANTAM: This is not the work Maya Shankar thought she'd do when she was growing up. But it's the work she loves.

SHANKAR: One of the great blessings of playing the violin is that it allowed me to see what it really felt like to be in love with something. There are so many ways in which passion can manifest.

VEDANTAM: As the Obama administration finishes its remaining days in office, Maya Shankar is planning to leave the White House. She is preparing yet again for another transition.

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SHAPIRO: Shankar Vedantam is host of NPR's Hidden Brain podcast.

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