Feature

The New Scientists

The winner of the NZSM essay competition for students at the Auckland and Otago Summer Science Schools.

By Marie van Wyk

I was born on December 4th. That makes me a Sagittarius.

I am 17 years old. That makes me old enough to drive a car, leave school, buy a pack of cigarettes.

I want science to be a part of my career. That makes me one of a minority.

Why is it that when you ask a child `what do you want to be when you grow up' they respond with teacher, doctor, air hostess? Where are the children who want to grow up to be neurophysiologists, ecologists, oceanographers?

Sure, "teacher" is probably easier for the average 5-year-old to say than "neurophysiologist", but there must be more to it than that. I cannot understand why so many people are never encouraged to even consider a scientific career. Maybe it has something to do with the stubborn stereotype that exists of scientists as reclusive, bespectacled people who stand hunched over frothing test tubes all day.

Maybe that is what scientists were like in times gone by, but not any more. My time at the Science Summer School gave me a chance to get to know about 120 of the scientists of New Zealand's future. I can't think of a group of people further from that stereotype. They included some of the most friendly and outgoing teenagers I know. They had interests in sports, music, art and drama. They cared about the environment, about people, and about the world around us. They also knew that science is an ever-changing, ever-growing and ever-rewarding area to work in.

Exactly what was this Science Summer School?

Take 120 sixth formers from all over New Zealand, Australia and Fiji, some of the most talented science lecturers in New Zealand, a dozen or so student staff, and a director who knows just how to keep them all under control, and you have all the basic ingredients for a fortnight of fun. The activities we participated in were as diverse as `creating' thousands of baby sea urchins, investigating the fat content of sausages, sharing our problems with a computer psychiatrist named ELIZA and discovering the wonders involved in the biochemistry of the heart.

By the end of the fortnight, we had all taken part in real live science. The work was much more than standard textbook experiments. We were actually working side by side with some of Auckland's top researchers, something which not every 17-year-old is privileged enough to have experienced.

Michael Faraday once said, "It is the great beauty of our science that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subject of research, opens the door to further and more abundant knowledge overflowing with beauty and utility". The Fletcher Challenge Science Summer School opened numerous doors for all who attended. Which door we choose to walk through is now in our hands.

Marie van Wyk is studying Bursary English, French, Classics, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry at Rotorua Girls' High School.