Willett is carrying a 3.9 grade point average and still finds time to serve as president of the student chapters of both the Society of Women Engineers and Habitat for Humanity. She competes in the American Computing Machinery programming contest, and is engaged in an independent study project with Gary Ybarra, an assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering, on methods to use microwaves to detect breast tumors. And a summer 1998 internship job at a Hewlett-Packard data storage division facility in Colorado was so successful that she went on to telecommute with the firm for about 12 hours a week during her entire junior school term. She did that so she could spend the summer of 1999 studying at Oxford University in England as part of her A.B. Duke Scholarship. I don't sleep nearly as much as I'd like to.
Some days are just very, very long.
But it has also increased my endurance, my determination and my stubbornness. I don't want to give up. I know I can do it. A well-spoken woman who is quick to smile, Willett attended the prestigious Illinois Math and Science Academy for three of her high school years. The daughter of a nurse and a Lucent Technologies manager, she also spent time at the University of Illinois in Chicago working on computer molecules of drug molecules.