BEST & BRIGHTEST: Teen excels in adopted homeland

TO OUR READERS: This is one in a series of stories featuring The Gazette's Best & Brightest high school seniors, Class of 2009.

It's no ordinary teenager who would use her "senior skip day" to clean her room.

But then ordinary wouldn't have gotten Paulina Mikolajczyk to the University of Chicago as a Boettcher Scholar.

Not bad for someone who didn't speak the language until she was 10 years old.

Now Mikolajczyk speaks three.

"I never considered not being driven," said the Cheyenne Mountain High senior. "That was not an option."

Mikolajczyk came to America from Poland when she was 9 and struggled to fit into her fourth-grade class.

"School was miserable," she wrote. "I could not speak. My tongue was stuck to my palate. American children stared at me."

But the "bright and motivated" girl - as her mentor Dr. J. Robert Thompson described her - quickly learned English as she devoured more than 100 books in that first year.

Now she's fluent in Spanish as well. That skill frequently comes in handy with Mikolajczyk's volunteer work at Penrose Hospital, where she's donated a staggering 750 hours in four years.

"The nurses call me a lot," she said.

Hospital staff promoted her to the head of the Teen Volunteer Committee because of her "compassion, knowledge, leadership and communication skills," Thompson wrote.

Mikolajczyk, who is striving to become an American citizen, will study biology at college - specifically genetics. But she'll also dabble in psychology. Whatever Mikolajczyk settles on, she knows her career will drive her to working with, and for, people.

"This may be my fatal flaw, my hamartia," she wrote. "I do not stop. I am driven by the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of knowing."