celebrating her Bat Mitzvah in 1962. The Bat Mitzvah was not common at this time. Resnik was noticed for her intellectual ability while still in kindergarten, and she entered elementary school a year early. She attended Fairlawn Elementary School, Simon Perkins Junior High School, and Harvey S. Firestone High School. She was an outstanding student, excelling in mathematics, languages and piano. She played classical piano, and at one point considered a career as a concert pianist. Before college, she attained a perfect score on her SAT exam, the only woman in the country to do so that year and only the sixteenth woman in US history. She graduated from Firestone in 1966 as valedictorian and runner-up homecoming queen. Although her mother disapproved of her dating, Resnik had a series of boyfriends. She preferred to socialize with boys from the nearby Copley High School rather than from Firestone, where her intellectual reputation preceded her. She met Len Nahmi at a basketball game. He was half Irish and half Lebanese, and her mother disapproved of him. Nonetheless, she continued to see him secretly, and when she stayed with a cousin in Cleveland while taking a college course available to high school students, she also met with him there. Her parents acrimoniously divorced while she was a teenager, and custody was given to her mother, as was the custom in the United States. Her mother's dislike of Nahmi became more intense, and Nahmi eventually ended their relationship to spare Resnik more pain. When she was 17, she prepared and filed a successful court case so that her custody could be switched from her mother to her father, with whom she was particularly close. She tore up letters from her mother unopened. Her father remarried, and she acquired twin stepsisters, Linda and Sandy, who were nine years older than she was, and with whom she became close. At age 17, Resnik entered Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she joined the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority. She began college intending to become a math major, but in her second year, after attending electrical engineering lectures with her boyfriend Michael Oldak, she developed a passion for the subject. She was one of three female students in electrical engineering. She was a gourmet cook and a navigator in sports car rallies, in which she took part many times with Oldak in his Triumph TR6. She earned a Bachelor