• Question: when did you start to be interested in science?

    Asked by anon-247472 to Martha, Jennifer, Dan, Ben, Baptiste on 6 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Dan Brunsdon

      Dan Brunsdon answered on 6 Mar 2020:

      I kinda fell into science actually, I found anthropology at college whilst I was studying history and just fell in love with the course. When I went to university I changed my course from history to anthropology, and then when it came time to choose what to do after uni I thought ‘well, why don’t I stick with what I enjoy?’. That for me meant staying with anthropology, and finding a way to make it more practical – and so through a long windy road I found my way to medical anthropology

    • Photo: Baptiste Ravina

      Baptiste Ravina answered on 6 Mar 2020:

      When I was 10-16, I had the chance to live very near the world’s largest particle physics laboratory (CERN, near Geneva), so that had a big impact on the way I viewed science, and physics in particular. I think I was always curious about science anyway, wondering how things worked, but that really helped me understand that, if you dig deep enough, everything (chemistry, biology, the universe…) is really just physics in disguise 😉

      My very first “wait, that’s weird…” moment was when I learned to ride a bike (I was 6-7 maybe?): if you go very slowly, it’s scary because you’re not stable; but if you go faster in a straight line, it’s almost impossible to fall. Took me a good twelve years to finally be able to prove why that is the case. Physics – it works.

    • Photo: Martha Jesson

      Martha Jesson answered on 8 Mar 2020:

      To be honest, I struggled with Science during school. But when I needed to choose my A-Levels I decided to go for Psychology as I had never studied it before. It was completely by accident but it went hand-in-hand with Biology. I studied both as I started to understand how similar these subjects were and how well they went together. It was a bit of a shock to the system when I realised how much I liked these science subjects!

    • Photo: Jennifer Carroll

      Jennifer Carroll answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      I’ve always had an interest in science. It was something my parents encouraged. I remember getting a science experiment kit for Christmas one year and we spent many hours with a flask bubbling over the little Bunser burner, growing crystals and discovering something new.

      I enjoyed science at school, particularly physics and chemistry, but also the area I grew up has a big science employer, Sellafield – home to the UK’s first civil nuclear power station. So we had many school trips to the visitor’s centre and when my secondary school became an academy it was sponsored by Sellafield. Getting to work with two engineers from Sellafield when I was studying for my A-levels, as part of the Engineering Education Scheme, helped me decided to choose chemistry as one of my choices for university applications.

    • Photo: Ben Rowsell

      Ben Rowsell answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      I think I was always interested in science without ever really realising what it was or how it was linked to what we learnt in classes. At school I was always just quite good at it so just got through it but It was always the practicals I loved. Realising that all the theory you had learned was shown through actually doing the experiments. I wasn’t exposed to much of this at school or college so it was really at university that I really enjoyed it. This is the reason I’m still doing research into it all now.

Comments