James Monroe High School was in such bad shape that New York City Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines decided to close the school in the fall of 1993.

This year's senior class at James Monroe will be the last to graduate from the school.

Next year, James Monroe High School will be renamed New School for Arts and Sciences and will open as a special high school for the arts and sciences.

Summer at Columbia

Ramos persevered during that first year at James Monroe and was awarded a scholarship to study molecular biology and genetics at the Summer Program for High School Students at Columbia University.

The program, which he attended after tenth grade, marked the first time that Ramos had attended classes with white students. The program also piqued his interest in the life sciences.

"To my surprise, I was still raising my hand, answering questions, and I was doing well," Ramos said. "For once I was in a class where no one was throwing erasers at the teacher, shouting out, or telling the teacher to shut up--stuff that happened back at James Monroe. Seeing this beautiful campus where kids are going to school because they want to in the summer was a whole new thing for me."

His experience at Columbia motivated him to complete an application to several top colleges during the fall of his senior year.

Yet, his sights had been set on Harvard since tenth grade.

"One teacher told me after she saw a third 100 on a biology test that if I kept that up, that was Harvard material," says Ramos, a history and science concentrator. "Ever since then I said, 'Yeah, I want to go to Harvard.'"

But Ramos still had to navigate through a high school guidance system that was not accustomed to having one of its students apply to a top-notch school.

"Teachers did not want to write me letters of recommendation, and those that did would write them on these little pieces of paper, and I had to go and type them up and bring them back to them so that they could sign it," Ramos says. "I had to do everything."

Despite his many trials at James Monroe, his desire to become a primary-care physician in his home neighborhood kept Ramos focused.

"I have always wanted to be a doctor because my mother is a chronic asthmatic, and when I was nine I used to think she was going to die a lot of the time," he says. "Every time she would go to the emergency room it was me to like she was being revived again; so I envied this power that this physician had to influence someone's quality of life and actually save lives."

But sometimes in his neighborhood it was difficult to focus on any career goal.