#igem2016

It has been a while since we returned from the Giant Jamboree so now we’d like to share our experience with you!

This year the jamboree was held from 27th to 31st of October in Boston, and around 270 teams had turned up for it. It was nice to see several familiar faces among them, from our previous meetups. We were really amazed by the scale of the event and how well the iGEM Foundation managed it!

There were three intense days filled with presentations and poster sessions, which showed us the possibilities of synthetic biology around the world. It was amazing to see how fellow iGEMers were trying to solve problems in innovative ways. On one of the evenings, there was an inspirational discussion about careers in synthetic biology led by experts in the field, some of whom were also iGEM alumni.

Fielding questions from judges and the audience at the end of our presentation (Photo: iGEM Foundation and Justin Knight)

Saara and Jami holding the fort during one of the poster sessions

At the final ceremony, we were awarded with a gold medal! This was based on our overall project as portrayed in our wiki, as well as the poster and the presentation at the jamboree. We were glad that our hard work over the summer and autumn had paid off!

After finding out about our gold medal achievement, here we are with our amazing supervisor

Wanting to make the most of our stay there, we visited two biotechnology companies after the Jamboree - New England Biolabs and Ginkgo Bioworks  - and got a tour of their awesome facilities. We also visited the campuses of the highly-reputed MIT and Harvard University to get a glimpse of the life there.

We were given a great tour of the Ginkgo Bioworks facilities by Massimo Merighi

Outside one of the many grand buildings of Harvard. 

iGEM will leave a lasting impression on me.

In what is coming to an end, my mind is in a quasi-state between the retrospective and the anterograde. There were many milestones reached; accompanied by arguments and compromises, disappointment and hope, and timely decisions that ultimately altered the course of the project. There were strong friendships made with those on my Lab & Design team, and there were strengthened connections made with professors. There were lessons learned in coordinating my own research team, and there was a lot learned from doing so with a co-lead. We brought strangers together and transformed them into a skilled team held together by a solid social mortar. What we did was unfathomable to the me from two years ago when I had no research experience.

Leaving behind Waterloo iGEM’s active team, and thus becoming a “Council of Elders” member, I’ve accepted the responsibility of passing on this Lead role to another unsuspecting, ambitious, and determined member. They will endure exhaustion, vitriol, and disappointment. They will experience the growth of the team they will select, the excitement in deciding the project, and the high of seeing their plans come to fruition. They will learn things about themselves they couldn’t imagine, and others will look at them with awe, unable to understand how they fulfill the unspoken “job description” of a Lead. It’s a position where you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, and thus demands a sense of courageousness, fortitude, and altruistic sacrifices from one’s academic/work/social life for the sake of the project.

My time on this team is coming to an end, but iGEM will continue to stay with me.

In what was quite a humorous process, I’ve gained confidence in my research skills while simultaneously gaining a lot of confidence in my visual appearance through Tinder. Though some would describe it as shallow, Tinder did genuinely change my perception of myself and that is unarguably not shallow. The overall boost in confidence in both my professional and personal life is a milestone I now acknowledge as incredibly important for my growth. I know that I am a competitive candidate for graduate studies, and thus would like to be selective as to where I go.

With all of this under my belt, I am excited for graduate school. I look forward to the continued exhaustion of scientific research, the students I will mentor, and the contributions I will make towards the field I choose to research in. I know I am going to be an above average graduate student, and I know I am going to reach beyond my supervisor’s expectations. I will be looking at all labs in the UofT, UW, and UBC pharmacy schools. I will also be looking at various protein engineering and vaccine production labs. Lastly, I will be looking at graduate programs affiliated with hospitals. I hope to stay within the GTA, and I hope that my supervisors will have more active roles in their graduate students’ research.

Returning to UW this Monday night, the projects and the work I look forward to returning to include Special Topics in Biochemistry, CRT, and my honours thesis project. I hope to be in the Aucoin lab almost 40hrs a week, and intend to produce phenomenal results. I’ve sacrificed two months of work for iGEM, but it’s going to change drastically now. Beyond all this, what I look forward to the most is spending more time with Juliana, my girlfriend. She’s been so incredibly patient and supportive, and I can’t thank her enough for not leaving my ass behind and dumping me in these two months of postponed study dates and poor communication from my end. With iGEM essentially out of the picture, I should have no more reason to bring my professional world’s negativity into her life.

Beyond my current responsibilities, I also look forward to this Winter Term where I have a lot more freedom. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’m quite serious about starting a newspaper for the Faculty of Science. Both the Math and Engineering faculties have their own newspapers and I think this is a key milestone for a faculty to reach in order for it to become better known. Moreover, having our own newspaper improves the science community and gives students a chance to voice their opinions, address large concerns, or simply express themselves and their experiences being in science. I find that I do like to write, and helping create this newspaper would complete my undergraduate chronicle at UW.