And while Rakow remembers very clearly throwing the punch that won her the national championship, she says her newly won rank, as number one in the nation, still feels a little unreal.

"It's really weird," she admits. "I've been doing this for so long, and I came in third last year and second the year before in high school, but to win the whole thing..."

She trails off.

"Well, it's just a really great feeling."

Rakow has been studying karate since the age of six.

"I actually cried until my parents let me train," she says. "My brother was in training, and he would practice on me; I needed a way to defend myself."

Rakow says that despite those early sparring sessions with her brother, her parents are still slightly nervous about their little girl sparring. While Karate Kid-style "Sweep the leg!" theatrics are unheard of in the disciplined, traditional world of Shotokan Karate, like any parents, they still worry.

"My dad didn't want me to enter the sparring competition, and so when I kept winning they were just laughing the whole time," Rakows says.

She pauses again.

"Sometimes they're like, 'Oh, Rebecca! All that money we put into your teeth," says Rakow as she laughs affectionately.

A veteran of international competition since her junior year in high school, one suspects Rakow can take care of herself. She credits her sensei in Phoenix, known as Kaoyama Sensei, as her biggest influence.

"I was very lucky in Phoenix to have one of the five masters of the United States, one of the five highest ranking black belts in the country," Rakow says. "He's just an amazing influence. He kept my drive and my interest in Shotokan going."

Rakow says that keeping that interest going in the stressful world of Harvard has been surprisingly easy. She says that karate's mental side--which stresses maintaining a calm, clear focus--has helped her in other ways as well.

"I find that when I train I tend to do better in school" Rakow says. "You need a stress release. It's a great way to learn to focus and to keep that focus."

Aptly enough, the word kata, as translated from the Japanese, actually means 'personal meditation.' Rakow guesses that 'kata' is something she'll be doing as long as she can.

"One of the amazing things about getting to train with the masters is that they're all in their sixties, and it just makes you realize that this isn't something that's just for when I'm young and when I'm strong," she says. "This is something I can do, almost forever."