Paradigm shifter
Maxime Cohen, a graduate student at the MIT Operations Research Center, could be doing just about anything now. He could be an aerospace engineer — his field of study as an undergraduate at the Technion in Israel: In their senior year, Cohen and a few friends spent a semester building a solar-powered drone that could fly 75 kilometers in a single go. They won a Technion design competition, and later, an international contest in Texas. Had money been sufficient motivation, he might still be working in finance, his first career after leaving the Technion with a master’s degree in electrical engineering. Or he could still be at the Israeli real estate firm he co-founded with his father and two friends: Cohen’s father brought decades of hands-on experience, while the younger partners supplied an analytical edge. Were he solely an altruist, Cohen might have pursued his charitable work full-time: In college, he started an...