Hello! I’m Ruoxi He, an outgoing student and athlete attending the University of Oregon. I enrolled in the Lundquist College of Business in the fall of 2013 with a concentration in Marketing, and a special interest in the fields of technology and fashion merchandising. I am expecting to graduate in June of 2015 with a major in Business and minor in Psychology. In addition, to being a full time student, I am also the Women’s Team Captain of the University of Oregon Rowing Team.

My team has shaped me to become a goal-oriented and highly-motivated leader. Over the last 3 years, rowing has taught me how determination, commitment, and optimism among groups can create meaningful successes. There is a book written by Daniel James Brown, about 8 rowers that came together and changed history. There is a powerful passage in the book that describes them working together at the highest level–he calls it “the swing of the boat”:

“There is a thing that sometimes happens in rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define. Many crews, even winning crews, never really find it. Others find it but can’t sustain it. It’s called “swing”. It only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing in such perfect unison that no single action by any one is out of synch with those of all the others… Rowing then becomes a kind of perfect language. Poetry, that’s what a good swing feels like.”

-Daniel James Brown, The Boys In the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

This passage describes exactly what my crew trains for every morning. We work toward finding a unified, fluid momentum that will carry the boat through the water at its highest speed. This is what I want to recreate with every team I work with. I will carry the poetry I make when I am racing with my crew, to the team I work with in my future job and career.