Shane beats off competition to scoop prestigious Harvard award
ASK the average man in the street to name the best University in the world and chances are at some point he’ll mention Harvard.
One of the eight Ivy League Universities, the Massachusetts-based institution has a reputation the world over, its name associated with some of the greatest minds of our time.
And although Shane O’Farrell hasn’t quite reached that level just yet, he has left his mark on this esteemed place of learning.
Last week the Wexford town man won the Katie Y.F. Yang Prize, an annual award for Harvard’s best performing international graduate in the Certificate in Management (C.M.) programme.
This was just the culmination of a long journey for Shane, one which began in Pine Ridge and now sees him living in New York, working for Microsoft and winning prestigious academic awards on the side.
‘I was doing three modules as part of a Masters in Management, with a focus on Business Management. There were 12 classes altogether and I got As in each of them, my GPA (Grade Point Average) was 3.97 out of 4.00, there was one A minus which cost me 0.03 from my score,’ Shane says from his apartment in the Big Apple.
Shane completed his two-year postgraduate degree from New York, taking his classes online, combining his studies with a full-time job, travelling the four hours to the Harvard campus when required.
‘It was hard, the biggest challenge was time management. I’d work a full day in Microsoft, come home at say 6 p.m. and have a class at 7 p.m. and in between all this we were trying to grow our book business.’
Because yes, not content with being a Technical Account Manager at Microsoft, and a part-time student at Harvard University, Shane and girlfriend Dayvsha also operate a burgeoning book business.
‘I definitely have an entrepreneurial streak,’ Shane says. ‘I love working for Microsoft, I don’t have any plans to leave in the immediate future, I’ve always had an ambition to move into management, that was what spurred me to do the Masters.
‘But that entrepreneurial streak has always existed, I have definitely always wanted to build my own businesses. My girlfriend and I have been building an Amazon business on the side, selling books on Amazon.’
And yet despite all these distractions he still managed to perform better than every other international student in a course which he says is taken by ‘lots’ of people.
‘Because it’s part of Harvard’s online wing there were a lot of international students, I would have been in group projects with people from Europe, all over Asia, India, there were a lot of people doing that programme.’
Furthermore, because of the current climate, Shane didn’t attend his graduation in person last
Thursday. Instead, like all the rest of the University’s graduates, he had to accept his congratulations virtually, watching online as the Harvard president commended the students’ achievements via Zoom.
And because New York is still very much in lockdown, any plans to share the moment with family will have to be put on hold too.
‘I’ve been here since the start of 2017,’ he says. ‘It’s been pretty crazy, we were badly hit. It’s still in lockdown at the moment, it’s mandatory to wear a mask if you’re going to be within six feet of someone else; it’s a weird place right now.
‘As you can imagine the apartments in New York don’t really cater well for lockdown; no balconies, gardens, you’re in a little box for two months.’
Having graduated from CBS Wexford in 2007 Shane moved to Dublin to study in DCU, returning home to Wexford every weekend, working in Subway to help pay his way through college.
And he says that without the support of his parents Eleanor and Nicky he wouldn’t be where he is today.
‘I worked in Subway but that didn’t make a dent in what I needed to get through college,’ says Shane. ‘My parents did a lot for me, they got me started on this journey, they paid for my undergrad, believed in me, scraped it together to make it happen.’
It was Shane’s mam who the first to find out about his award and, after sharing the news on Facebook, he has been inundated with messages of support from his native county.
‘There’s been an outpouring of messages from people I haven’t talked to since I left school, teachers who taught me, it’s been amazing, to see a response like that from the extended Wexford community has been really nice.’
Describing himself as a ‘home body’ Shane is missing the quiet life at the moment, the slow pace of home, and although his immediate plans are to continue to build his career in the States, he says in the long-term he hopes to spend more time back in Wexford.
‘My immediate future is in the States, but the end goal is to have businesses, real estate, investments that keep us financially stable so I can go home to Ireland for longer periods of time,’ he says.
‘Then whenever I go home I can spend the whole summer in Wexford That’s what drives me, if I work hard, if I can build businesses, invest smartly, then eventually I’ll be able to spend longer periods of time at home.’