Mad About Science :: Personal Narrative Essays

Mad About Science    The trip to Singapore this summer was the most educational and most enjoyable trip I have ever taken. Weeks later, I still look back at my photographs, email several people daily from the US and foreign delegations, and tell my friends and family about the experience. I particularly enjoyed the lecture by the researcher from the Human Genome Project. Because I have had less interest in biology in high school, I had not been following the updates on the Human Genome Project very carefully, and he summarized the project and also explained its significance well. One of the aspects of the project that I found most intriguing was the ability to cure diseases through the project's research. The speaker said that by first reproducing diseases, scientists would be on their way to curing them, and I had not realized the significance of the Human Genome Project in that respect. The lecture from the Australian professor, while not always aimed at as serious an audience as he was dealing with, was also interesting, and the video I took of him was one of the favorites of everyone I showed it to when I came back home.    For me, the best part of the trip was the science and technology exhibition. Not many kids came to my exhibit, probably because it was just a computer screen without much on the board behind to attract attention. But I did talk to a group of maybe 15 students from a local school. They were interested at first in the contest I had participated in and in my web site and the process I had gone through to create it, but pretty soon they lost interest in that and became more concerned with my height. Like several other students I met, they all wanted photos to remember how much taller than them I was. But the most valuable part of the exhibition for me was walking around to other countries' booths. When I asked the students to tell me about their projects, they were always happy to describe their work. What really impressed me was the practicality and creativeness of their projects, and that so many groups of students from so many different schools could come up with such great projects. I tried to take a photo or video of each project that was described for