Annie Le was so focused on academics that, even though she was the valedictorian of her high school class and her classmates voted her “most likely to be the next Einstein,” she filled out 102 applications for scholarships.

“My tongue is sore from licking envelopes, my wrist hurts from typing and stapling, and the post office clerk knows me on a first name basis,” she wrote in a one-page primer she left in the files of the school in El Dorado, Calif., “but other than that, there is nothing I can complain about; It was not difficult at all!”

Her work paid off, literally: She received $160,000 in scholarship offers, said Tony DeVille, who became principal three years ago, three years after she graduated.

The money took her to the University of Rochester as an undergraduate. She went on to Yale, where, as a 24-year-old graduate student, she was studying pharmacology and planning her wedding to another serious-minded student from her days in Rochester. It was to have taken place on Sunday.