Team:Bonn/Collaborations
Restriction
Modules tested
Team Members
Meetings
iGEM Spring Festival 2019
We set out to make the greatest meetup in Europe and invited teams from all over. We achieved our goals and set a new standard for future meetups.
Meetups? Just about fun? Far from it! Meetups are a big part of the iGEM year, just to build relationships and work out further collaborations. You learn to present your poster, a skill that will be used and mended throughout the whole year. Interesting talks are presented by different professors, expanding your horizon beyond your own project.
Bonn Meetup
The work for our team started early in the year, by finding a place where the meeting could take place and select a date. Fortunately, the caesar, the Center of Advanced European Studies and Research agreed on hosting. The first week of may was chosen as a date because Bonn offers a lot for foreign students and visitors during that time. Not only is the Kirschblütenallee in full bloom, the Rhein in Flammen, but a great firework festival is also taking place and attracting several thousand. It was also still early in the iGEM year so that the meeting could be of the best use when it comes to working between different iGEM teams. After we secured a location where all other iGEM students could sleep, we started contacting professors. To our surprise and excitement, many were very interested, so we could provide the participants with six different talks by professors, with topics ranging from stem cell differentiation to brain behavioral and imaging, topped by talks of Doulix and Promega representatives. We did not only host the meetup for current iGEM members, we included an After iGEM event as well, with workshops and talks specifically designed for what Alumni could do to still support iGEM while not being active and in the lab anymore. While all of this was a lot of work, it was very rewarding for us, to see how we made hundreds of people laugh over our not so great ability to brew coffee, we are a lab team after all, and how people thoroughly enjoyed the stay in Bonn and took a big portion of knowledge back to their projects and new enthusiasm to work. We tried to make the meetup interactive, so we hosted eight different workshops, where everyone was able to choose the one in which he or she is most interested. While of course, the main focus was on the conveying of knowledge, the fun also did not run short. Whether it was a universal table soccer tournament or a workshop on memeology presented by the creators of the Instagram iGEM meme page, we tried to keep a balance between science and fun, all accompanied by our original iGEM happy song. The Family Feud - iGEM Edition at the end of the meetup perfectly combined the knowledge we need for the lab work, with cloning and transformation, while also making a fool of yourself and proving what iGEM really is all about between the hard work and stress: Learning things and making memories for a lifetime!