The call came at midnight, two days before last year's chamber-music concert. The director of Kenyon's Symphonic Wind Ensemble had to fly out of town for a family emergency. He was phoning junior Katie Woods, his conducting student and the ensemble's assistant director, to see if she could pick up the baton for him.

"The next day, he handed me the scores," remembers Woods, who had been scheduled to conduct just one piece, not four. "I practiced that afternoon and the next morning. I wasn't scared until 10:00 p.m., after the concert, when I said to myself, 'What did I just do?'"

Maybe it's the resourcefulness of a veteran band-camp counselor, the finesse of a fine French horn player, or the crisis-management skills of a seasoned math tutor. Maybe it's simply knowing—expecting—that her Kenyon professors will set the bar high, then help her succeed. The fact is that nothing much seems to faze Katie Woods.

A senior this year, completing majors in both music and mathematics, Woods relishes creative challenges. Last summer, she stayed on campus as a Summer Science Scholar, collaborating with Professor of Mathematics Bradley Hartlaub on novel statistical approaches to analyze genetic data. Her work broke new ground and yielded a poster presentation for the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

Then she threw herself into organizing "Real World: Gambier," a provocative (and popular) Orientation session engaging first-year students in honest discussions of issues like alcohol, sex, and partying. Woods drafted skits and recruited actors, drawing on her experience as a community advisor (CA), one of the upperclass students who plans activities and serves as a resource in the residence halls.

"In almost every class, we've had cool projects," says Woods. "For me, those are the biggest learning experiences." In one advanced statistics course, she worked with an actual data set from the Nielsen media research company, which later contacted her with a job offer. This year, she's focusing on her Senior Exercise projects: a study of "spline regression" (a statistical technique) for math; and, for music, a concert of her own, for which she has chosen the repertoire and recruited a student ensemble.

This time when she picks up the baton, she'll have more than two days to prepare.