• Question: what got you into science

    Asked by anon-243492 to Pan-ngum, Natalia, Mick, Manjit, Filipe, Bruce on 10 Mar 2020. This question was also asked by anon-243941.
    • Photo: Michael Schubert

      Michael Schubert answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      When I was very young, I loved dinosaurs and wanted to study them. I knew that palaeontologists are scientists who study dinosaurs, and I knew that geneticists are scientists who study DNA (and sometimes even the DNA of ancient animals like dinosaurs!). Both of those jobs sounded really interesting to me, so I read everything I could about dinosaurs and DNA.

      Everyone’s path into science looks different. Some people love plants or bugs or space. Other people don’t think they like science – they like art or writing or music. But there’s science in all of those things: the science of light and colour and materials for art, or the science of sound and physics and technology for music. Sometimes, you don’t even realise how much science there is in everyday things until you start learning more about them.

    • Photo: Natalia Brodaczewska

      Natalia Brodaczewska answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I wasn’t really interested in dinosaurs as much as Mick but I liked other things – I was always interested in learning about animals and I was a big butterfly geek – I used to run around with books about butterflies and make notes about which ones I’ve seen in my butterfly diary. I was also a bit interested in geology so I used to collect stones and minerals and learn about them too. The funny thing is that for a long time I wasn’t really interested in chemistry as a subject and I wasn’t even any good at it. But my teacher in high school was amazing – she was very passionate about chemistry and pushed us hard to do well on our final exams. I ended up being top of my class and decided to go on and study chemistry at the university. So I guess it was a combination of factors that got me into science – my curiosity about the world, some science-related hobbies and a very good teacher that got me excited about chemistry and helped me understand the difficult bits.

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