Ms. Rebecca Rose Ramaswamy

Class of 2005
Career Pathway: Human Services

Rebecca Rose Ramaswamy was nominated by Carol Ramaswamy.

At GHS, Rebecca was a member of the concert, marching, jazz and pep bands (and was a drum major her junior and senior years), was in the casts and crews of plays and musicals and competed on the forensics team. She was a member of the National Honor Society and was named a National Merit finalist, an AP scholar with distinction, a member of the all-conference academic team and valedictorian of her class.

Rebecca graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in language and development and Hispanic studies in 2009. Her thesis was The High Stakes of Low Linguistic Tolerance: Discrimination Against Language Minorities in No Child Left Behind Through High-Stakes Testing.

She earned her Juris Doctor at Columbia Law School in 2015 where she was the "Notes" editor of the Columbia Journal of Race and Law in 2014-2015 and the treasurer of Law Students for Reproductive Justice in 2013-2014. She was honored with the Morrow Scholarship for outstanding clinic performance in 2014 and was named the Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar for academic achievement in 2013-2014. Her article "Bars to Education: The Use of Criminal History Information in College Admissions" was published in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law in 2015.

Since November 2016, Ms. Ramaswamy has worked as a staff attorney for Equal Justice Under Law in Washington, DC, where she litigates high-profile civil rights suits across the country to eliminate wealth-based discrimination in the criminal justice system.

She previously was employed as a legal fellow at LatinoJustice PRLDEF in New York City. While there, her article, "Being Counted at Home: Do Black and Latino Community Ties Matter to the U.S. Census Bureau?" was published in the Huffington Post. 

She was also a civil action practice legal intern for the Bronx Defenders, a legal intern for the Brennan Center for Justice, a student clinician for the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic at Columbia Law School, a legal intern for the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, all in New York, and a marketing coordinator for Leadership Asheville in North Carolina.  

Her sister Rachel and her brothers Ravi and Robert are also GHS alumni, and her mother Carol is a member of the CASD board of education.