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Rogers' Christi Nowak is Star Tribune's Female Scholar-Athlete of Year

Star Tribune June 21, 2006

by Ron Haggstrom

Christi Nowak is among the elite when it comes to academics.

The Rogers senior recorded a 2,390 out of 2,400 on the SAT and a perfect 36 on the ACT. She was one of 16 students in the state and 251 nationwide to get a perfect mark during the 2004-05 testing period, according to the ACT national office in Iowa City.

Her college entrance exam scores were so outstanding that she was accepted to Harvard, but has since declined to attend the Ivy League school. That's right, declined.

"I mostly applied to see if I could get in," Nowak said. "I didn't know if I would be accepted, but I knew I had the potential. I was happy to be accepted to Harvard, but I didn't want to go to a school that far away from home."

Nowak also wanted to continue Nordic skiing, and instead will attend the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn., with one additional recent honor on her résumé. The three-sport athlete is the Star Tribune's female Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

"Harvard also has a ski team," Nowak said. "I talked to a member of the team, and she said that she trains herself on a golf course in Boston. That didn't sound very appealing to me."

Nowak plans on majoring in pre-medicine, but is also considering biochemistry and environmental science.

"It's going to be something in science," Nowak said.

She also ran on the cross-country and track teams in high school, most of the time competing for Elk River, since Rogers didn't open until the fall of 2003.

"I thought about switching schools, but stayed at Rogers," Nowak said.

She ran two years of track and one year of cross-country for Rogers, and skied for the Elks throughout her high school career, taking sixth in the 5K freestyle race and 13th in pursuit in the Nordic ski racing state meet this year. "It turned out well for me," she said.

That's also pretty evident from her test scores. As far as the 10 points she missed on the SAT...

"It was in the math portion," the Rogers valedictorian said. "By the time I took that test I was pretty tired of college entrance exams. I thought that score was good enough."