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Aneta Galazka is not your traditional University of North Georgia (91¸£Àûµ¼º½) student. At 42, she is more mature than many of her classmates, and even though she moved to Georgia from Poland as an 18-year-old, she has yet to acquire a southern accent.

What Galazka has acquired is a drive to succeed, steered by a love of mathematics, her chosen major. She is minoring in statistics and biology due to her belief in a strong link between math and biology through statistical models.

 As a prelude to a busy senior year, Galazka spent 12 weeks this summer interning with 192 students from 47 states at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outside of Washington D.C.

Her research team project at NIST was setting up a high-speed wireless communications network for public safety agencies that would perform even in the event a cell tower is damaged or destroyed. She said that during the course of her internship, she was surprised to discover two things about herself.

"I realized I can dream big and I can accomplish great things when I'm surrounded by people with similar minds," Galazka said. "And, I discovered my own limits, that what I learn in a textbook can only take me so far, I need real life experiences to complete my education."

This fall, in addition to a full course load of classes and working as a mentor in the supplemental instruction program at 91¸£Àûµ¼º½, Galazka is applying for both a Fulbright scholarship and a Woodrow Wilson Georgia Teaching Fellowship.