I made up my mind in high school that I was going to become a genetic engineer. I’d work on important world problems like hunger and disease and innovating life. I wanted to invent inch-long grass that never needed mowing, stuff like that.

I often think back on how easily attainable that goal could’ve been… and why I didn’t do it.

1. Step One: Decide to become a bio-engineer. Pore through books that tell you that there are only two universities in the entire West that have bio-engineering programs: University of California at Berkeley, and Arizona State University. ASU? Wow, that’s in your back yard, and you can go there for free because your grades are high enough!

2. Step Two: Keep being told over and over by trusted adults that if you want to be a scientist, you’re going to need to take a lot of math. You hate math because your trig teacher believes that students should “teach themselves” and reads a novel at her desk while the other students sit on the tops of their desks, throw things at each other and loudly goof off. You are Serious, though. You have taken four years of math — more than necessary — because you hold on to this dream. You are getting an A despite having no real teacher. But so are a lot of people, because the district decided that math is Hard, so they dropped the minimum level for an A to 85%. Good thing you weren’t planning to leave the state, right?

3. Step Three: Go to a summer program before your senior year in high school. You have decided to study bio-engineering at ASU. Be told by a very well-meaning program counselor that bio-engineers design prosthetic limbs for people who have lost arms and legs. Ask the counselor what you should study if you want to do genetic engineering. The counselor will shrug and say “I don’t know, zoology?”

4. Step Four: Be told by well-meaning adults that genetic engineering is a very competitive and low-paying field, one in which you will never feel satisfaction in your work.

5. Step Five: Give  up. Major in journalism. Work in marketing. See how you went from wanting to work in a traditionally-male field to actually working in a traditionally-female field? Join a wonderful nonprofit that supports an *amazing* biodesign center and chafe at not sticking to your guns.

I’m far from distraught at how my life turned out — I work hard, put my heart into everything that I do, and invest myself in every organization that I work for. I’ve been rewarded for that, richly. But there are still nagging thoughts that I could’ve become a scientist, my childhood dream, if people hadn’t kept tacitly steering me away from it.

How to encourage more girls to become scientists:

1. Don’t tell them they’ll be paid badly. Few men stay away from math or science because of paychecks — they want to be the next Einstein — but I’d be willing to bet that most aren’t told they’ll end up poor.

2. Stop using The Threat of Endless Math Classes as a scary disincentive. Yes, you’ll probably end up using math at your sciencey job. Know what? I use it in my marketing job all the time, a lot. Math is life. It’s nothing you won’t be able to handle.

3. Don’t be all super-enthusiastic for girls who want to pursure math and science, then sit back and do nothing. We got a lot of cheerleading in high school to boost our self-esteem, but no real nuts-and-bolts tactics for becoming actual scientists. Take a girl to a lab and show her real live women working in science. I can’t think of anything more motivating than that.