During middle school everyone was required to do science fair projects. I enjoyed it. Therefore when I got to high school it seemed natural to take up the opportunity to continue science fairs.
The first few months of freshman year passed by with little progress. I met once with an engineer at a local company, suggested designing a pencil with replaceable erasers, and that was the end of that potential mentorship.
Eventually, just a few weeks before the science fair project registration deadline, the science fair coordinator introduced me to a microbiology teacher who was helping some of her juniors and seniors conduct research outside of class.
I took a leaf from my dad's book and ended up investing whether and how burned plastic, a carcinogen, affected bacterial transformation and, in turn, resistance to antibiotics.
I didn't know how to present at my first science fair, so I used note cards and it was underwhelming for everyone involved. But I did automatically qualify for the state fair because I was the only student from my school, and earned an honorable mention.
After the fairs, my microbiology mentor encouraged me to write up the project and submit it to a journal for middle and high school students' research. She claims that the praise we received on my mostly solo-written paper far exceeded feedback she got for her upperclassmen's group-written reports.
It's easy to look at my work in retrospect and think that I sought to get results, qualify for selective science fairs, and even get published. But in reality I just went with the flow.
I had no end goals in mind—at this point I didn't even know I could get published and was blissfully unaware that there existed a whole culture surrounding high school science fairs.
Had I been trying to publish from the start I probably would have taken better pictures of my cultures, avoiding needing to resort to tacky graphics depicting my experimental design.
There were lots of areas where the science could have been more rigorous, but the experience and mentorship built the foundations for me to do more legitimate work in the future.