regarding gwen's scientist leanings...
(note: i'm looking off of this)
her high scientific aptitude is mostly the default. 11/17 times (14, if you count 65b, 18157 and 26496, who are straight-a students without generalization) gwen's canonically stem-oriented.
[the others: 65a/8, 684, 1610: all punk gwens]
her specialty varies. she's a biochemistry major five times (616, 617, 120703, 1074; we don't know what 6160 studied, but given that she runs a biotech company, it was probably that). she's into engineering and technology three times (3109, 457, 17628). she's a physics student twice (96283; technically 65b). she's a psychiatrist once (21798).
every time gwen's a stated biochem major, she grew up with her mom, and all but 120703 are confirmed to enjoy baking. and little girls, especially in the 1960s, tend to have their first exposure to chemistry through baking with their mothers. maybe that's how she discovered her love of that particular subscience.
even when gwen doesn't end up working as a scientist, she incorporates it into her work and vigilantism: she runs a biotech company (6160). she's a detective who uses forensics to track her leads (617; and the default description for spider-gwen implies that she uses a detective's skillset). she's a psychiatrist whose biochem background would help her prescribe medications for her patients (21798).
the one time gwen makes it to college and doesn't graduate with a degree in a hard science, her usual friend group (harry and flash) are both political science majors who want to work in government. it's never stated if gwen's in their program, and in this timeline, she's being sexually abused by a professor who's usually a science teacher in most continuities, so it's more likely that she was a science major and switched tracks to get away from him. she's not a psychiatrist because she was naturally drawn to the profession. she's one because it's what she was left with, and because it helped her process her trauma. and psychiatry approaches mental health from a neurochemical perspective, so she's still using that scientific background. (21798)
related: all the tech-specific gwens use their skills in robotics and coding to supplement their super-suits and/or assist their teams. and gwen-457 also enjoys baking-- which makes one wonder if these gwens started as biochem specialists, but switched to tech because it was considered more useful.
related: gwen-96283 and gwen-65b are both introduced in physics classrooms. while 96283 sits at the front of the class and is a responsive student, 65b stays quiet in the middle, but only to avoid suspicion; she's smart enough to intuit, with no outside help, that she needs to head to alchemax to find the information and technology necessary to get back to her home dimension, was such a convincing 'intern' that she got past security by walking right in, and can calculate the angles of elaborate jumps in milliseconds. again, we see an instance of gwen's non-biochem specialty driven by pragmatism: a need to get home, and to be a good spider-woman.
and regardless of whether gwens 65a and b liked biochem, they were clearly still good at it, because that's how they were formulating their synthetic webbing.
the same goes for 18157, who shows a strong preference for music, but is a good enough student to attend standard high (which, as the school for nyc's richer students, gwen could only afford on a scholarship), and to nab the school's sole slot in the daily bugle's prestigious internship program. she might not like science, but she's got to be good at it to be where she is.
it's pretty much a given that gwen's a good student by default. sometimes she even goes so far as being a teacher's pet. the only time she's considered a 'bad' student is in 1610 and 18157, where it's for her behavior rather than her grades.
her mother is the engine behind gwen's popularity, and not coincidentally, the only continuity where she was never raised by her mother and still became somewhat popular (17628) is the one where gwen goes to horizon high, a school for teen geniuses, where she's so in her element that she's able to transcend that lack of conventional social graces.
otherwise, though her mother's the one getting gwen into the fanciest schools, gwen's smart enough to get into gifted programs on her own, and often does even when her mother isn't in the picture (65b, 17628, 18157).
so in general, gwen stacy is hard-wired to be interested in and good at science, as well as math. her intelligence is a given; it's whether she's willing to use it in a conventional educational or professional setting that varies.
biochemistry is gwen's specialty, but she's versatile enough to switch to a different one to satisfy her own needs or the needs of the people around her-- for gwen, pragmatism outweighs passion when it comes to what science she sticks with… but even if she can't practice science as a career, she usually finds ways to incorporate it anyway.
(strangely, 65a and 684 are a bit of an outlier in this regard. these gwens are firmly focused on music, seldom use scientific solutions to defeat villains, and feel their way through problems rather than thinking out of them. tbh, i've never liked how THE mainstream spider-gwens are the ones whose intelligence has been largely ignored in favor of physical strength and emotional motivation, by both writers and fandom. even 65b is still ultimately driven by feelings (for the men in her life 😐), and her intelligence is either a plot device to put her in the same situations as miles (visions, alchemax), or framed as ~another thing she has in common with him, omg she’s his soulmate!🙄~ than a trait of her own.
it's just very... hmmm to me that gwen's intelligence and booksmarts, her defining personality trait, was the first thing to get massively downplayed when she got superpowers. i want to say it started as a side effect of gwen-1610 being the blueprint for gwen-65a/the original spider-gwen, but it's stayed gone for a bigger, shittier, more sexist reason.)
