Army Student on a Mission

When master’s student Raman Solanki started classes in the fall, it took a little getting used to seeing students slouched in their seats or chit-chatting with classmates as they waited for the professor to begin a lecture. After serving as a sergeant in the U.S. Army for the past three years, the casualness was unfamiliar. Now, a month into the semester, he still forces himself not to show up before everyone else. 

“In the military,” he says, “if you’re not 15 minutes early, you’re late. Even if I’m 10 minutes early, I think I’m already late. I’m still adjusting to the looser structure of civilian academic life.”

Discomfort, however, isn’t something he’s trying to avoid while he’s a student in the Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship Program. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he wanted to become an HGSE Empowerment and Impact Fellow. The fellowship was created to help students develop leadership skills needed to address conflict in complex situations.

“The Empowerment & Impact Fellowship felt like the right kind of discomfort,” Solanki says. “I already wear several hats, but this fellowship asked me to slow down and look inward: What kind of leader am I becoming, and for whom?”

So far, he says, the fellowship has challenged him to see leadership as something deeper than success or just getting things done. “It’s about being accountable to the communities one serves and the systems one wants to transform. Learning from Joe [Pinto] and Houman [Harouni] in the fellowship alongside brilliant fellows is rarer than finding a unit that moves in perfect sync without ever needing a command — everyone just knows the mission and owns it together. I also joined because I didn’t want to just ‘do more.’ I wanted to be better — to understand how impact actually happens, and how to make sure it uplifts rather than simply disrupts.”

This desire to uplift is something his command sergeant major noticed about Solani during his training at the U.S. Army Transportation School at Fort Gregg-Adams (now Fort Lee) in Virginia, and why she called him a “positive changemaker.”

“At graduation, she told us she had watched carefully when I was assigned platoon leader and how I led my platoon, not through rank or intimidation, but through conversation and care,” he says. “I tried to lead by example, listening, keeping morale up, and bringing in new approaches that respected both efficiency and humanity. When she called me a positive changemaker, I think it was her way of saying that leadership doesn’t always mean being the loudest voice; it can mean being the most consistent source of calm, trust, and forward motion.” In January, Solanki was awarded the Meritorious Unit Citation by the commanding general of the D.C. Guard for the role he played in the 60th U.S. Presidential Inauguration. 

His approach to being a leader continues to guide him at Harvard, he says. “Here, positive change might not look like a command decision or like platoon leadership. It looks like asking a question that opens a dialogue or helping someone find their footing in a room where they feel unseen. It looks like being a part of teams where I can have the most impact.”

One of Solanki’s goals, especially after he graduates and continues active duty in the Army, is to find ways to better connect what the Ed School has to offer to what veterans or soldiers in his unit might need, he says. 

“I’m trying to recruit more service members to come here,” he says. In the military, “we do have educators, and we do have teachers. I do have trainers in the Army. We have to get certifications and trainings to qualify to be mission successful and mission ready. … And some of the classroom teachings that happen here can be used within the Department of War as well. I want to bridge the gap between the service and the stuff that we do here.”

He calls this “duty and discovery,” a term that “captures the tension of living between two cultures: the military and academia,” he says. “Duty is about structure, obedience, and mission. Discovery is about questioning, experimenting, even failing. In other words, in the Army, duty means precision, discipline, and loyalty to the mission, a world where clarity saves lives, and where uncertainty can be dangerous. At HGSE, discovery means learning to live inside uncertainty, questioning systems, unpacking assumptions, and reimagining how things could work differently.” 

In uniform, he says he learned to lead through pressure and structure. In the classroom, he is learning to lead through curiosity and dialogue. 

“When I mentor younger service members” about continuing their education, he says, “I tell them that learning is another form of service, one that strengthens the legacy they already carry.”