But on second thought, maybe his graduation today is not so hard to believe.

For those tears of his mother shook him with such force that right there in that office and in front of that principal, he pledged for the first time in his life to get his act together.

The principal reluctantly promoted him to ninth grade, and Ramos--true to his word--did get his act together and did behave.

*****

The Pforzheimer House senior arrived in the United States from Puerto Rico at the age of two, and his family immediately settled in the South Bronx, a section of New York City notorious for its high crime and poverty rates.

Soon after arriving in New York, Ramos fell into trouble in the neighborhood and at school. In first grade, he was expelled from school for disciplinary problems and was usually suspended from school two or three times a year every year after until the eighth grade, when Ramos' final meeting with the principal occurred.

At the meeting, the principal clearly and forcefully told Ramos that the school "had had enough" and threatened to place him into the school's special education classes.

"I will always remember that meeting in the principal's office and my mom's crying because she did not want me to be put into special education," Ramos says. "That really hurt my feelings--seeing my mother cry--and at that point I said I was going to behave."

The principal during the summer decided not to send Ramos to special education and promoted him to ninth grade, despite serious misgivings.

And in ninth grade, Ramos for the first time was successful academically.

"To my surprise I started to do very well in algebra in ninth grade.... Algebra sparked my intellectual interests because I liked solving problems," Ramos says. "My algebra teacher started praising me, and that was a change from other teachers who used to put me down."

At High School

He took this success in algebra and his affinity for mathematics and the sciences to James Monroe High School, a public school in the South Bronx.

But when he arrived at James Monroe, Ramos soon found out that academics was merely one of many obstacles he would face.

"James Monroe was the typical inner-city public high school: there were metal detectors at the front door, a nursery for students there who had their own kids, two shootouts in the front yard," Ramos says. "The highest math they had there was trigonometry, and the labs we had were totally atrocious and dilapidated."