What prompts a person to make a decision that will change their life forever? For me, it was being born a female in a developing country, India. I had a happy childhood filled with warm memories and a supportive family, but because I was a girl, it seemed that I had fewer rights than boys and couldn't have the freedoms and education they were offered. My future was to marry a man as arranged by my parents, rather than have a full career. But I wanted something different. After spending a glorious summer at a youth World Wildlife Fund camp in Mudumalai National Park in the mountains of the Western Ghats when I was 13 years old, I decided that I wanted to be an ecologist to study and preserve nature.