(wait I actually have no idea how to participate in the podcast. I'm just going to post the gist of what I have to say here because I was just thinking about this in another thread)

I hated science class until high school. Hated it. I loved English, I loved math, I could tolerate history and other subjects, but science always seemed so boring to me. It was just mindless facts to memorize! Or so it felt to me, who didn't pay enough attention in class to know whether there was anything else going on. I was going to become a famous novelist so it didn't matter anyway.

Then one day near the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, we were learning about bonds in chemistry and something clicked. This didn't feel like a mindless fact: there was a mathematical logic that made chemical bonds make so much sense. Having such a satisfying explanation for a phenomenon scratched a previously unknown itch, and I became addicted to it. That moment of coming to appreciate science completely changed the trajectory of my life. I distinctly remember flipping to the back of my chemistry book where they had mini-bios on different kinds of chemists and I was immediately drawn to the ones on researchers. I thought, This is what I'm going to do, and that was that. From that time on, I naturally started devoting more and more time to science, and without really noticing it, less and less time to my other extracurricular activities. In another life, I might have been a novelist, or a ballerina, or a violinist, or a pianist. But instead, the fascination with the question why consumed me, and it hasn't stopped consuming me since.

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Tangent: In the last paragraph, I mentioned being consumed with "why" instead of with my other more artistic interests, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. It seems to me that asking "why" is of fundamental importance in the arts. The burn I feel is something different, although maybe not qualitatively different. Perhaps this is why so many scientists are also artists.