Education
In Washington, D.C., Portman attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. Portman learned to speak Hebrew and attended a Jewish elementary school, the Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County, New York. She graduated from Syosset High School in Syosset, Long Island in 1999. Portman skipped the premiere of her film Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, so she could study for her high school final exams.
In 2003, Portman graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. degree in psychology. "I don't care if ruins my career," she told the New York Post. "I'd rather be smart than a movie star." At Harvard, Portman was Alan Dershowitz's research assistant. While attending Harvard, she was a resident of Lowell House and wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson in response to an essay critical of Israeli actions toward Palestinians.
Portman took graduate courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the spring of 2004. In March 2006, she was a guest lecturer at a Columbia University course in terrorism and counterterrorism, where she spoke about her film V for Vendetta.
Portman has professed an interest in foreign languages since childhood and has studied French, Japanese, German, and Arabic.
As a student, Portman co-authored two research papers that were published in scientific journals. Her 1998 high school paper, "A Simple Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar," co-authored with scientists Ian Hurley and Jonathan Woodward, was entered in the Intel Science Talent Search. In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy" during her psychology studies at Harvard. This publication placed Portman among a very small number of professional actors with a defined Erdős–Bacon number.
Read more about this topic: Natalie Portman/Jerusalem And Israel
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
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“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
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