Tammy Long got an idea of what science was all about when she went to Costa Rica as a college student.

“My instructors basically said, ‘There’s the rainforest. Go find something that you’d be interested in researching,’” she said. “That completely changed what I was going to do for a career. They had introduced me to inquiry.”

In a recent discussion with AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellows, several young women said that animal anatomy had turned them off to science. “I didn’t like the pig dissection,” said Xena Issifi, an eighth-grader from Paul Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.