You might think that Courtney Ondeck has gotten all the breaks. She's beautiful and smart. In high school, she ranked fifth out of 305. Last spring, she did one better, graduating from Carnegie Mellon number one in her materials science and engineering major—a distinction made all the more compelling by the fact that she completed a double major in biomedical engineering and, on top of that, managed to pack in all the classes she needed for pre-med. She's slated to go to Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, one of the best in the country. She'll get to that next year, though. Come September, she'll be taking high tea and learning to drive on the left side of the road as she studies at Cambridge University on a prestigious Winston Churchill Scholarship, the most intense of the major fellowships. Her professors at Carnegie Mellon have big, big smiles on their faces over that one. It's been 16 years since a Carnegie Mellon student won the Churchill.
Yes, Ondeck has gotten all the breaks. That includes some tough breaks—literally. The first one came when she was in eighth grade, playing basketball in a township league. She went down on the court with a Lisfranc injury, a serious fracture in a joint in the middle of her left foot. It's hard to see on a typical X-ray, which makes it an easy thing to misdiagnose. But after a while, when the swelling hadn't gone down and she still couldn't put any weight on her foot, her doctor referred her to a foot and ankle surgeon who figured out what was going on. By then, the arch in her foot had fallen and she had developed stress fractures on her foot. Fixing it involved fusing her joint, doing a bone graft on the side of her foot, and lengthening her Achilles tendon. She had a hard cast on for eight weeks, and when they removed it, she was devastated to find she couldn't walk. Her muscles had atrophied. Rehabilitation was painful. It took nine months to relearn how to walk, then another nine before she could run again. Instead of playing sports for three hours a day, she was in physical therapy three hours at a time, three times a week. She was there so long that not only did she know all the physical therapists, but she knew the other patients, too. The 14-year-old became such a fixture that the staff included her whenever they did basketball pools.
She worked out with the team her sophomore year but couldn't play yet because she was still in PT. Finally, junior year, she was out on the court shooting hoops again. She was back to being an elite high school athlete with visions of playing Division I basketball in college. Then, crash. A second Lisfranc injury—this time her right foot. The surgery put her back in rehab for most of her senior year. Her doctor told her to keep in mind that she wouldn't be wearing high heels for a job when she got out of school.
In college, she met a guy from her high school who was surprised he had never crossed paths with Ondeck before. She was "the girl on crutches," she told him. She rode the elevator a lot, and because his locker wasn't by the elevators, well, there you have it. Difficult thing, high school is. Being in and out for surgeries, hobbling around on crutches, doesn't make it any easier. But her tough breaks made for some defining moments. They showed her what she was made of—someone who could bounce back from something if she worked hard enough and stuck to it. That's a lesson that came in handy at Carnegie Mellon where she charted herself a tremendously challenging course.
Ondeck is quick to say she was lucky to have a lot of support from her family. In her first year, she didn't feel like she was prepared for the rigors of some of her classes, particularly physics. She hadn't taken AP physics like most of her classmates. So her father, a mechanical engineer, dusted off his old physics books. It would take him all day to work a problem, but then he and she could talk through the concept together.
It was also in her freshman year that she developed her prodigious time-management skills. "I was spending far too many nights at the library until three in the morning," she says. "I thought, 'Something is going to have to give, and it's not going to be my sanity. I have to get to bed.'" She learned a lot about prioritizing then. "If I have a big test and a little assignment, study a lot more for the big test and not get caught up on the little assignment. Because you can't do everything perfectly. You have to know when you can slack off a bit."
Ondeck also appreciates how her professors were willing to go the extra mile. People at Carnegie Mellon recognize when you do a good job, she says. You don't get lost in the crowd. If she can put her mind to it, she can do it, she says. Notice there's no maybe in that sentence. Work hard, stick with it, don't be afraid to ask someone what you don't understand—that's the magic formula.
Ondeck stood out, even as a little button of a 2-year-old. She wasn't a good passenger, so her mother memorized nursery rhymes to entertain the tot in the car. It wasn't long before Ondeck could recite them right back. Her mother remembers a 5-year-old neighbor who brought over a Fisher Price toy that would give you a word, leaving some of the letters blank for you to fill in. And there was 2-year-old Ondeck, filling them in better than the older child. "How does she do that?" the 5-year-old wanted to know. Mrs. Ondeck didn't have an answer.
Fourth grade, you could see the discipline already developing. She'd come home from school, take out her homework, and get down to it. Some nights, it would be 9:00 before she'd done it to her satisfaction. Her fifth-grade teacher worried about her. A child like Courtney, she told Mrs. Ondeck, who has gotten A's all the way through elementary school—well, she might get thrown for a loop when she gets to high school and gets a B. As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. Ondeck sailed right through high school getting A's just like she had in grade school.
"Courtney is extremely hard working and brilliant—a powerful combination," says her boyfriend, Matt Jones. Jones knows of which he speaks. A 2007 Carnegie Mellon materials science and engineering/biomedical engineering grad, he snagged his own high-caliber award last year—a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship at Northwestern University. There he is working with Chad Mirkin, the top-cited nanomedicine researcher in the world. So Jones has some bragging rights, too.
Still he admits to being intimidated when he first met Ondeck. "My first real experience with her was taking a physiology class together," he says. "This particular class was well known for being very rigorous—a lot of memorization. I had studied with her for the first exam. She clearly had a good grasp of the material—more so than I. In a difficult class like that, your grades typically are done on a curve. If the entire class does poorly but one person does really well, then they've screwed up the curve for everyone else. She was the person that I singled out as one of those people that would screw up the curve for everyone else."
Yep, she's off-the-charts smart—but you'd never know that from talking to her. She's very humble when it comes to her achievements, Jones says. Time and again, when classmates talked about the exam they had just taken, Ondeck would say she had done terribly, that she thought she had failed it. "And inevitably we would get the test back and she'd have the highest score," says Jones. "She's a smart girl. There's no way she didn't know after taking the exam that she did well, but externally she's not at all cocky or presumptuous." Internally she's very confident—she has to be in order to have that kind of motivation and drive.
Her materials science and engineering professor, Mike McHenry, seconds the motion. He's given her more A's than any other student in 20 years of teaching, he says. In addition to the four classes she took with McHenry, she's worked closely on a research project with him and in collaboration with an oncologist at the Hillman Cancer Research Center the past two summers. The project explores the feasibility of using heated magnetic nanoparticles to kill targeted cancer cells. Nanoparticles, as you might guess, are very, very small—one millionth of a millimeter small. Cancer cells die off at a lower temperature than normal cells, which suggests the possibility of using heat to kill the cancer cells without harming normal cells. Ondeck is working with a ferrofluid, a suspension of nanoparticles and a polymer that can be heated to 100 degrees, though she says she probably only needs hers to get to 45 degrees. She's done heating experiments to understand how fast the nanoparticles heat and what happens if you change the polymer. Then she wrote a programming code in Mathmatica to look at the theoretical heating rates of the nanoparticle.
Writing computer code to simulate a mathematical model takes patience, says McHenry. "Students Courtney's age are not patient in general," he says. "But she is. She navigates roadblocks. She comes for advice when she needs it, but she will dig. And she works incredibly quickly. She has a particular kind of calm that lets you sit back and think and recognize things in science."
"Courtney has the right combination of ambition, drive, and ingenuity to become a leading medical scientist and expert in nanotechnology," says Judith Zang, fellowships advisor in the Fellowships and Scholarships Office at Carnegie Mellon. In fact, Ondeck was offered the Churchill Foundation Scholarship, which is awarded to only 13 U.S. students each year, after the briefest of phone interviews. It was so brief, in fact, that Ondeck wasn't quite sure what had happened. She had been prepared for questions that might be thrown her way. Instead, the interviewer asked what questions she had for him and then offered his congratulations. "She went in the office to take the phone call," says Zang, "and came out a minute later, saying, 'Ummmmmm, I think I was offered the scholarship.'" Interviews are usually used to eliminate candidates, says Zang. "It sounds to me like she was really at the top of the list. They had already decided they wanted her."
At Cambridge, Ondeck will work with a researcher looking at polymeric nanostructures for different applications, including drug delivery. "I've worked with nanostructures, but I haven't worked much with polymers," she says. "It will be a different lab, different lab experience, different professor, different projects—so it should be a really good experience. I am excited."
Despite her talent in the lab, she says that her passion is for pediatric clinical medicine, an interest that developed when she was being treated for the injuries to her feet. She was enamored by the difference a thoughtful, caring doctor could make in the lives of young patients. Still, she may squeeze some research into her medical career. "I'd like to have the passion from seeing patients transfer over to the lab to realize that you really do need to solve this because there are people who are sick and something needs to be done."
What the girl who has gotten all the breaks wants most, it seems, is to make a lucky break for someone else. Work hard, stick with it, put your mind to it—to that list add this: Make a difference.
Sally Ann Flecker is an award-winning writer whose work appears regularly in this magazine.
