"Harvard doesn't have bureaucrats to understand a Dominican immigrant woman from the South Bronx. She just has to adjust and deal with it," she says. "It probably makes me a better person."
While Reynoso says she has always rejected elitism and that elitism was despised by her community, at Harvard she feels she has become part of what she has always hated.
"Just the fact that I have that name attached--Harvard '97--it's like adding another last name to your name," she says. "From where I come from, your last name means everything, your economic strata. Harvard is a last name. It puts you in the highest caste. You can't erase it."
Many poor and working-class students are ambivalent about Harvard itself--an institution that essentially guarantees for its graduates the wealth and elitism that it symbolizes.
The median net worth of a graduate of the University is $952,400, according to the most recent market-research study conducted by Harvard Magazine. Median household income is $125,800. Half have pursued post-graduate study, and two-thirds hold professional or managerial jobs.
"In terms of education--how much advantage you've taken of the opportunities presented to you--you can graduate at whatever level of education and connections that you choose," Mary B. Lawless '97 says. "The fact that we all go to Harvard and will have gone to Harvard, we have a certain common ground already, which will help ease over divisions like gender, class, whatever. If we choose to when we graduate, we can be rich."
Rather than elation over the possibility of the economic prosperity that eluded parents and friends from home, many students from poorer backgrounds expressed a deep uncertainty over whether the opportunities--some would say transformation--offered by Harvard are without drawbacks. Some fear being branded as sell-outs.
Ramos, who hopes to work as a doctor helping innercity residents, says success in the South Bronx is defined as "living in your phat house and getting out of this hell-hole."
Now that he's at Harvard, he doesn't think that's such a difficult task and that the real challenge is combining skills acquired through education with social responsibility.
"The magical thing about this place is it's a class bridge. Once you come in here, you know you can't go back down," he said. "It's easier to flow into the mainstream of yuppiedom. I don't know if I can say they're selling out. It's just the easier thing to do."