When Kassie Wells ’07 (Rochester, Minn.) was in ninth grade, she plucked her father’s copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos off the living-room bookshelf and read the weighty book from cover to cover. It took her breath away. “It was amazingly cool,” she recalls. “It took a whole bunch of facts and recreated the history of the universe. It brought together my love of solving puzzles and looking at patterns and telling stories. I knew that [studying science] was what I wanted to do.”

Sparking an interest in physics and astronomy isn’t the only thing she can credit to her father. A high school teacher and golf coach, Jeffrey Wells was taking Kassie out on the links when she just nine years old. It was a family activity: Her mom, younger brother (Trent Wells ’10, currently playing varsity golf at Carleton), and younger sister all headed to the golf course whenever they got a chance.

Wells also played fast-pitch softball and basketball, but she found herself drawn mostly to golf. “Golf is a sport where you have to control your emotions. Adrenalin might help you in something like basketball, but in golf, it will probably make things worse,” she says, noting that a golf swing must be repeatable, and a swing that’s just a bit faster or slower than usual could mean the difference between a great shot and a terrible one. “There’s an intellectual challenge in knowing yourself and keeping all of your motions under control.” By the time she reached high school, she had become one of the top golfers in the state and had attracted attention from Division I schools—including Harvard.

Although she was waitlisted by the Ivy League school, she probably would have chosen Carleton anyway, she says, because it’s a place where she could balance her studies and outside interests while making an immediate impact on the golf team.

She quickly became a top player for the Knights thanks to a peerless work ethic and an ability to improve weak areas in her game, says head women’s golf coach Eric Sieger. “A lot of players would tend to fall into the same [practice] routines, but Kassie does a good job of evaluating her strengths and weaknesses,” he says. “She knows where she needs to put in her time to improve her game.”

Over the past four seasons, Wells has rewritten the Carleton record books, established herself as one of the top players in the region, and even earned the top spot at a few tournaments, including the Carleton Spring Invitational tournament in her sophomore season and the Luther Women’s Invitational in her junior season. Her sophomore-year victory was particularly notable: Playing through driving rain and 40-degree temperatures and facing national-caliber golfers, Wells topped the rest of the field by three strokes.

Her accomplishments are even more remarkable given that she rarely has time during breaks to work on her game: For the past two summers, she’s worked on physics and astronomy research projects through Research Experiences for Undergraduates, a program that supports active participation by undergraduate students in areas of research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). She’s also been a research assistant to Joel Weisberg, the Herman and Gertrude Mosier Stark Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the Natural Sciences.

Her NSF and Carleton projects have included studying pulsars and testing the viability of a new way to find the Hubble constant—the rate of expansion of the universe. “This past summer I worked at Cornell University looking at impact craters on the moon,” she says. “I found it fascinating that something that is as beautiful and serene as the moon has all of these interesting stories to unravel. The feeling I had [reading Cosmos] came alive for me again.”

This spring she may have a chance to cap off her collegiate golf career with a spot in the national tournament. While golfers in snowy climates tend to be at a disadvantage early in the spring season, Wells planned to spend winter term lifting weights, practicing her short game, and smashing golf-ball-sized Wiffle balls into Rec Center nets.

After that, she is likely to attend graduate school in planetary science. And while she might not have quite as much time to get to a golf course once she leaves Carleton, some things may not seem all that different. Because whether she’s on the greens or peering through a telescope, she’s got a pretty good idea about what it takes to be a star.

ERIN PETERSON is a frequent contributor to the Voice.