Tobias Overbeeke, Lily Holm, Maximilian (Max) Hunt and Annie Henderson spent two weeks in London, mixing it with 420 other budding scientists from 82 different countries.
Over the course of the trip they visited some of the top United Kingdom research centres as well as Oxford and Cambridge universities, hearing from some of the world’s top scientists and Nobel Prize winners.
Lily said the whole trip was an incredible experience.
"It went really well. The trip was amazing and the fundraising to get there went great.
"My favourite academic thing was getting to visit Cambridge’s brain and cognitive unit. I loved that.
"They were treating us as adults — we had the freedom of adults to go out, explore and just express ourselves more than what we could at the New Zealand Science Forum."
She said the trip made her re-evaluate what she wanted to pursue as a career.
"Now I’m thinking of doing something totally different than what I thought I was going to be doing at university.
"I’m now maybe less decided than what I was. It’s opened my mind to so many more options and opportunities and just the ability to know if I do something I can swap to something else and it won’t ruin my life."
"I think we all had very different experiences which made it even better, because even when we talk about it now it’s like ‘what on earth were you doing?’
"We’d go to our different lectures on different days but we’d also go out afterwards and be hanging out with all these different people. It was kind of crazy.
"It was all very self-directed: you just got to be your own person. If you slept in you missed out."
She said although she very much enjoyed the science side of things, the cultural experience was a big highlight.
"The biggest thing I took away was the social side, just getting to hang out with all these different people from all these different places with all these different cultural norms.
"The really just random experiences we had on a day-to-day basis were such a highlight."
Max said it was the little things that made the experience memorable.
"It was very easy to meet people. You’d just be walking along and see some with a lanyard and you’d start chatting.
"Things just like at breakfast, someone asked if we wanted cookies so three of us who had never met went off to get cookies, or the tram ride back from Richard III.
"In terms of visits, we went to the Tokamak Joint European Torus (Jet) fusion facility. It was getting record amounts of energy output and now they are disassembling it to study it. We got a tour of that and saw the robots they use to fix it, and that was so cool."
Like Lily, he said the trip had a big impact on his future plans.
"One of my biggest takeaways was to have goals and an idea of where you want to go but don’t have it all set it stone, be flexible. You don’t know where an opportunity can go."
However, for Tobias the trip very much solidified his future.
"I got to explore my boundaries and see all these different things, but going to the McLaren F1 factory and going to see the department of aeronautics at the Imperial College really confirmed my direction.
"I’m a massive car nerd so even just walking down the street on our random adventures, there were so many odd, weird, wacky cool cars around but the McLaren factory was definitely my biggest highlight."
Lily encouraged anyone thinking of attending a science forum to just go for it.
"Don’t be afraid to try things like this because I know particularly a lot of people in science are scared of getting out of their comfort zone, but just take every opportunity."
The four students were very thankful to everyone who had helped them get to London, from those who had just bought a couple bottles of cooking oil as part of their fundraising to others who had individually donated.
They also thanked their parents for being so supportive.
