Heritage High School senior Kaleigh Gerlich uses her math skills for more than doing homework each Sunday. On most Sundays the busy eighteen-year-old can be found at the Denver Zoo, calculating medicine dosages and food proportions according to the needs of the city's two penguin colonies. Kaleigh spends about six hours each weekend volunteering with the twenty-four tuxedo-clad waddlers. Each penguin answers to its own name, especially, Kaleigh explains "if the volunteer is holding food!" She particularly enjoys working with cuddly baby penguins about the size of a tennis ball.

Already accepted for college next year at CU-Boulder, the Florida Institute of Technology, Purdue University, and the University of South Carolina, Kaleigh sees practical applications of math study not only in her work at the zoo, but also in many other fields. She plans to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering and hopes eventually to be accepted in NASA's astronaut training program. Ranked near the top of her Heritage graduating class, Kaleigh has been passionate about math courses since middle school. Returning to public school after two years of home-schooling under the tutelage of her mother, Donna Gerlich, she took Algebra as a seventh grader, and as an eighth grader went to Littleton High School for an hour each day to begin high school math. By the end of her junior year at Heritage, she had completed the school's Advanced Placement Calculus course.

Last fall, Kaleigh took Calculus III at the University of Colorado at Denver. Thanks to a program that allows concurrent high school and college enrollment, she was able to complete the first semester of her twelfth grade year at Heritage during the daytime, riding to Denver on the light rail two afternoons per week to attend her college-level math class. This semester she continues that routine, taking "Linear Algebra and Differential Equations" on the university campus.

What perplexes Kaleigh now is that she is the only female member of her college math class. "All the other students know my name, since I'm the only girl," she says. While she feels that "being the only one makes it more of a challenge for me, because it makes me want to work harder," she also wishes that more girls realized what an interesting and rewarding subject math is for all students. Kaleigh's experience shows that knowing math can open doors for young women. In fact, she has already been invited to participate in Purdue University's nationally recognized Women in Engineering program.

While her sights are set on engineering, many other interests keep this outstanding young woman busy. A Girl Scout for thirteen years, she loves hiking and camping in the mountains. Her most vivid scouting memories are of a trip she took with the Girl Scouts last summer, when she was one of fourteen scouts selected from across the United States to travel to Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands. Having studied Spanish at Euclid Middle School and Heritage High, Kaleigh was able to serve as her travel group's interpreter.

As she concludes her final semester of high school, Kaleigh's teachers at Heritage know that this outstanding math student has mastered the formula for a busy and interesting life!

Jill Rickard is an assistant principal at Heritage High School.