Finding time for ACT perfection

Megan Brouillette was excited when she saw the email with her score on the ACT exam.

But it was almost like she expected to get that perfect score of 36.

“I was really hoping I would,” she said.

School comes easy for the Grafton High School senior, and she didn’t find the college entrance exam that difficult either.

But Brouillette knows she made one mistake on a question about laying and lying. She won’t make that mistake again.

That reveals a little-known fact. Brouillette said you can get a couple of answers wrong and still get a perfect score.

Reading, she said, was the most difficult section, but not because Brouillette struggles with the subject — quite the opposite. It was because “it’s the least objective.”

The math portion was easy, she said.

“You can work around stuff. A lot of times you can plug in the answer for X,” she said.

Brouillette had no trouble finishing the test.

“I am a very fast reader, so I was never pressed for time,” she said.

When it comes to school subjects, computer science is Brouillette’s favorite.

“I like problem solving, just being given something and figuring out how to do it,” she said.

She has created a computerized chess game and a virtual reality game in which people throw blocks off a castle and try to hit skeletons, and she made an app for checking children in and out of day care, modeling it after the one she uses at her part-time job.

Brouillette works four hours per week around her packed schedule. Her extracurricular activities include “all of the things I can possibly do,” she said, and she holds leadership positions in most of them.

“I like running stuff, improving it if I can,” she said.

Brouillette is a drum major and clarinet player in the band, president of National Honor Society, vice president of Leo Club, treasurer of Student Council and a member of the Model United Nations. She also does jujitsu and competes in Future Business Leaders of America.

“Your will is only limited by the limitations you set upon it,” she said.

Brouillette finished fourth in the nation in computer applications at the FBLA National Leadership Conference in San Antonio last year.

Her category had participants creating a spreadsheet of sales results of a business by compiling quarterly reports.

“The top 10 (finishers) were just who finished the thing. It’s rapid fire. It was a lot of fun,” she said.

Brouillette excelled despite working on little sleep. Her plane was late and she missed a connecting flight. She got in at 3 a.m. and competed at 8 a.m.

She is not, however, looking to join anything else.

“I am maxed out,” she said.

In what free time she has, Brouillette likes to go rollerblading, call her friends and read, often dystopian novels.

The Grafton Public Library is a favorite stop. Her mother’s library card shows she has saved billions of dollars on books.

“I used to have a 15-book limit when I went to the library,” Brouillette said. “I’m also very good at carrying things.”

A book only takes her 90 minutes to read.

Comprehending concepts at school can take around five minutes, with 40 minutes left of class time.

Her homework is “more like figuring out what I don’t know about what I don’t know,” she said.

“I need to know the why. If I don’t know, it will not click.”

She knows she doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of her parents. Her father is an actuary and mother is a dental hygienist.

“I’m not a huge fan of math. I definitely don’t want to clean people’s teeth for a living,” she said.

Instead, Brouillette plans to major in computer engineering at a school yet to be determined and become a professor.