What secondary school experiences have influenced them wanting to become scientists?

...sometimes I might have across something in one of the [secondary school science] lessons that I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting" and I’ll go away and have a look at that.

...they [the secondary school teachers] were willing to… put stuff in context and… connect it to the stuff I was reading and seeing and… talking about. Willing to talk about the horizon that was on last week… and explain how that linked to whatever we were doing in Chemistry…

...they [the teachers] were always willing to answer questions… I certainly felt if you wanted to go and ask… why that was, they definitely would listen to you. They were accessible…

… [we went to] the Natural History Museum in London... they just let us… go and do what we wanted to do… they said… “Here’s an activity sheet,” and I don’t think we did take that seriously, so we didn’t do the activity sheet. We were all just wandering around the exhibits and that was really, really cool.

…the most interesting thing I did at school was right at the end… I sampled the stream from behind my house in four different places and evaporated all the water from it… we… were left with the water from four different places on the stream… I thought, "Well nobody has actually done this before. Nobody has taken this specific stream and measured what's in that stream"…[in] four different places, we could see completely different things... even with our crude apparatus…

...we had to kind of make a crystal… I just couldn’t’ get it to work… the lesson finished but it was the end of school, and she [the teacher] stayed with me.. She didn’t help me, or tell me what to do…