He still harbors deep resentment against those in the community who once laughed at him when he told them he was going to make a difference or who complained about the decline of the community while heading to a liquor store or talking to a drug dealer.

"Everyone says the neighborhood is so bad, but then they don't do anything about it," Ramos says. "I grew up angry at the community itself, the drug sellers, the killers, those are the people who are screwing everything up for everybody."

At Harvard

That anger, along with a gamut of other emotions, accompanied Ramos when he arrived at Harvard in September of 1993.

He soon became frustrated with his school work, which seemed to come easily to his classmates but was hard for him to grasp.

He became angry at his fellow students who had the opportunity to take advanced placement (A.P.) courses in high school and had already studied the material in his first-year premedical courses.

"It was tough because students had had the courses already, and that really ticked me off," he says. "It was my first experience with the material, but everyone else was saying 'Oh, I remember that; that was from A.P. Calculus or A.P. Chemistry', and I'm like 'What are you doing taking this class?'"

He also became disenchanted with his daily schedule that first year.

His routine was a tiring grind of science courses, labs, training with the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), membership in the Black Students Association (BSA), and work at World Teach Inc., a nonprofit organization that sends college graduates overseas to teach English in developing countries.

"It was very hard here academically, socially, physically with the army, a job and all of these other things to do, but the work was something that I had to do because of my financial situation," Ramos says.

Despite the hectic schedule, Ramos' work ethic and dedication made an impression on his fellow classmates and his professors.

"I remember in this class of 300 people seeing this Hispanic student in the front who was hanging on every word, who really seemed to be enjoying what he was doing and who always seemed to know the answers for the hypothetical questions that I was posing," says James E. Davis, senior lecturer on chemistry and chemical biology and Ramos' instructor in an introductory chemistry course. "I was tremendously impressed with him."

Although his work and academic schedule were grueling throughout college, Ramos still managed to squeeze in at least a few hours a week of fun activities.

"Rey is so very hard-working and intense...We had this thing we called 'efficient partying,'" says Vivek H. Maru '97, one of Ramos' current Pforzheimer House roommates. "We would study really hard until midnight on the weekends and then bike down to MIT for a frat party. That way we could study a lot and still arrive during the best part of the party."

Yet despite the ups and downs, the highs and lows, Ramos maintains his belief that he and his classmates are tremendously fortunate to have had the opportunity to study at Harvard.