Waseca, Minn.
Computer science and math

Alternative exercise: Swing dance club--the East Coast and West Coast styles, Lindy Hop, and Charleston are her favorites.

Summer internship: Working for Lockheed Martin, a military defense contractor, with systems and sensors used by the Coast Guard.

Study abroad: "Cannot wait" to tour Japan and China as a flautist with Concert Band in Summer 2009.

In choosing a college, Maria weighed the merits of focusing narrowly on her academic interests--mathematics and science--versus exploring a liberal arts curriculum. "I could have gone to a strictly science school," she says, "but I wouldn't be playing my flute right now, and that's more important to me than I'd thought." She also plays bass--an instrument she picked up when she came to Luther--in Philharmonia orchestra.

As she expected, she's enjoying her math major; in fact, she's so comfortable with the subject she works math puzzles for fun, racing the clock to solve Rubik's Cube jumbles using combinations of algorithms.

"I got my first 3-by-3 cube in 9th grade when I had a teacher who really liked them," she says. "It took me weeks to learn how to solve it, but after that, seeing the solutions in three dimensions got easier. My best time is 43 seconds." She's since moved on to 4-by-4 and 5-by-5 cubes, the latter of which didn't come with any instructions. She's considering joining a Rubik's Cube club she recently discovered at Luther.

With multidimensional math on her mind, Maria discovered she likes computer science, and she hopes to write programs for computer animation someday. "Computer science feels like the purest form of problem-solving to me, and I've always wanted a job where people hire you to solve problems."

In the meantime, she's happy to pad up and down her residence hall floor, visiting friends, in her socks. "The whole dorm feels like your house," she says, grateful that her academic experience is supported by friendly campus culture. "You go home, and you get homesick for Luther."