Sujit M. Raman

As a freshman novice, he crashed his crew boat into an oncoming sailboat. Three years later, he was elected captain of the team.

Sujit M. Raman '00 is a Marshall scholar, headed nest year to the University of Bristol to study sociology. Before every success, however, comes a failure. Raman's came in dramatic fashion.

On an early spring day in 1997, Raman was a novice coxswain guiding a boat full of freshman lightweight rowers through the Charles River. As they headed towards the path of an oncoming sailboat, he thought his boat could continue full-speed ahead and pass without harm.

"I didn't know the rules of the river," he says now. "It turns out that sailboats have the right of way."

Sure enough, the boats headed towards a "face-off," as he describes it, and the crew boat took the brunt of the damage. Its bow snapped off, and the boat began taking on water.

"It was a pretty scary situation when it happened," Raman recalls. "It's sort of funny now--things have sort of improved since then."

Raman managed to steer the boat backward to the shore, and the sinking boat managed to dock safely. No one was hurt, though the boat was totaled. Raman still has the broken-off bow as a reminder and souvenir.

"The freshman coach tells novice coxswains that story, just to encourage them that unfortunate things happen, but things can work out," he says with a smile.

At the time, though, Raman received no scolding himself for the mistake.

"To be honest, no one ever talked to me about it," he says. "The freshman coach sort of expected me to quit, I think."

Raman has come a long way since then. He was the coxswain for the varsity boat for two years, and his senior year he was elected co-captain of the lightweight varsity team.

"It's been a big part of my Harvard career, a very big part of my development," he says. "You go through developments when you fail, and they can be helpful. It's been particularly important for me to succeed in crew after that first failure."

And even in England, where everything regarding traffic is backwards, he'll always remember that sailboats have the right of way.