Constance Campbell had to choose between two highly competitive university programmes when contemplating what to do over summer.She ultimately settled on University of California at Los Angeles’s Sci|Art NanoLab programme, turning down a similar course at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.The 17-year-old spent two weeks taking part in lab visits, workshops and hands-on experiments and meeting with world renowned scientists.The Bermuda High School student said the best part was having the opportunity to physically do the workshops “because it’s one thing to read about it and then it’s another to arrive somewhere and they say, ‘Here are your gloves. You are going to do this’.”She was able to make microscopes out of webcams — which she thought was “the coolest thing ever” — and learned how to genetically modify e-coli bacteria so that it glowed bright red.UCLA’s Sci|Art programme is for students in, or about to head into, their last year of high school.The California-based programme aims to help students connect cutting-edge scientific research with popular culture and contemporary arts.In addition to lab assignments and lectures, students are able to visit museums, watch daily movie screenings and meet famous contemporary artists who collaborate with scientists.Constance was one of 40 students in the programme — most hailed from different parts of the United States, with a few from India and Canada.The teenager, the only participant this year from Bermuda, didn’t feel intimidated.“I didn’t notice it as much at first because at BHS they give you the feeling you can go anywhere and do anything. But when I got there everyone was like ‘this is so cool, you come from such a unique place’.“I guess they expected that Bermudians go to other places to study science. I got asked if I go to the beach a lot.”Constance first fell in love with science at age ten when she attended the science fair at the Bermuda Biological Station (now BIOS).There was a bowl containing a mixture of corn starch and water and the properties changed depending on the force applied to it. “If you apply gentle or slow force it’s liquid, but if you move quickly it becomes a solid,” she explained.Her fascination with the experiment fuelled her passion for science, but only recently did she decide to study materials engineering.Her hope is to attend Birmingham University in England next year.Ms Campbell said the UCLA programme made her even more excited about starting university and getting to take part in similar experiments all the time. “I also feel like I better understand science and all the different things it can do in combination with the arts,” she said.She said some of the lectures were “quite academically intense” and required her full attention. “We really had to take notice and make sure we knew what was happening because they were college lectures and it was a new experience for me to have someone go off and talk about something I didn’t know about.”It was also demanding in terms of how many hours each day were taken up. Students woke up at 7am, with the typical day ending at 9pm — at which time the young people had to do their homework.But she said it was worth it. “It was different and not what I expected from a summer course. I didn’t expect it to be quite so much fun. I thought it would be like regular high school, but it was a lot more interesting and engaging.”She urged other young people to look into broadening their horizons with similar courses.“It’s just such a great experience and not really something you can get here. You have the Bermuda College and they run great programmes, but you get to a whole different calibre when you go to world-class labs and meet scientists doing these amazing projects.“Everything was so inspiring and it made me think I was on the right path and this was what I wanted to do with my life, at least for now.”