Bound for Calcutta

While his classmates prepare to enter business school or law school next fall. Shaun L. Mahoney will be packing his bags to work for a year or more with Mother Teresa, the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, in Calcutta.

Mahoney is unsure precisely what he'll be doing for Mother Teresa, but suggests several possibilities--work in a home for the dying, in a leper colony, or in an orphanage. He certainly won't be living in the lap of luxury: for his first two months. he'll reside "in a common room of sorts with a group of brothers" who will also work with Mother Teresa. After that, Teresa's order will no longer be able to fund his room and board--and Mahoney is prepared to make his own way.

A Government concentrator from Philadelphia who was president of the 1981 yearbook. Mahoney says he first thought of working for Teresa several years ago and that the idea gradually "germinated" into reality. "Anytime you do something new you have certain apprehensions, but I kind of feel it's something I'd like to do if I didn't do this after graduation."

When he told his parents of his plans to go to Calcutta. Mahoney recalls his mother actually "was sort of relieved to find that I was going to India." It seems his older brother had frightened his mother shortly before telling her Shaun planned "to go into the woods like Thoreau and all that," after graduation. When Shaun revealed his true plans, "she was kind of relieved I'd be working with people instead of living alone."

Judging from her son's past, though, she shouldn't have been surprised that he would opt to work with people. He is unsure about his career plans, but says his assortment of jobs in the last several years has convinced him he values "contact with people, work with people" in his job.

From the beginning of his junior year, through the following summer, and during the fall term of his senior year. Mahoney worked at a company that makes prostheses--artificial limbs. Missing a leg from birth, he calls his own artificial leg "pretty much a natural limb to me," but his frustration that the limb could not be used in the ocean led him to become involved with the artificial-limb company, first as a spectator, then as an employee.

Ultimately, he hopes, a limb usable both in land and on water will be fashioned. And though he stresses he is unsure what he will do with himself after returning to Calcutta, he says he will maintain an interest in the project "because it's something I can appreciate more than other people."

Mahoney expresses mixed feelings" about his Harvard experience, lauding the University as one of "the finest research centers in the world" but criticizing it for not having "taken a great deal of interest in the undergraduates. It kind of falls short as a college."

If he had to do it all over again, Mahoney says, he would have concentrated in Philosophy instead of Government, explaining that the part of Gov. he appreciated "was the thinking process that went into arguments, not the actual substance." Becoming a philosopher himself is just one of many possibilities he has yet to rule out--right now, all he is looking for "is a summer job to get some money to go India."