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Independent Study

by Alex :: Monday April 10, 2006

School now seems to be moving along faster than ever. Recently there have been big events almost every weekend that instead of demarcating the time actually seem to accelerate the familiar Thacher time warp. Things like having Senior Pages due (a page about ourselves that shows up in the yearbook) or having the Senior Exhibition outline due (a 12-page factual monster that is expected to be submitted sans a single mistake) make the time between deadlines seem to fly by.

One of these big events was the final presentation of my Independent Project on Ayn Rand. After finally reading all of Rand’s work, compiling research notes, and writing essays during the Winter term, it was an arduous undertaking to synthesize all my knowledge into a final presentation. I decided that a lecture format would work best. I finally gave my presentation on Sunday, April 2 in a mini theater known as Room 14. I had prepared interview snippets from a DVD I acquired called Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, and used these 6 minutes of footage interspersed throughout my lecture. The actual presentation went off much better than I had expected. I found that as soon as I started digging into the material I became more and more confident, and my diction and flow saw significant improvements. I was amazed as how the time seemed to fly by so naturally without any umm_’s or _what-do-I-do-next_s. The lecture including questions ended up being close to an hour and thirty minutes! For that same reason it would be hard to describe all the aspects of the presentation. However, one of the things I focused on for some time was the connection between _The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s personal life and her philosophy, Objectivism. I also ventured into the epistemology and metaphysics of Objectivism itself, and how I thought they related to Nietzsche and Kant. Another subject I was interested was how Marxist ideologies were manifested pejorative manner in Rand’s works (She came from communist Russia but quickly adopted America as her country).

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