Team:SDSZ China/Collaborations
Team:SDSZ China
Collaboration
Our team has collaborated with team iBowu-China to co-host the 2019 iGEM Beijing Meeting on July 7th, 2019. The meetup’s initial goal was to promote the communication between high school iGEM teams in Northern China and offer chance for teams to exchange suggestions and help on each other’s projects. Yet when teams signed up for the meetup, not only high school teams but also undergraduate teams in northern and southern China.
12 teams in total including several high school teams from Beijing and Shenzhen as well as some undergraduates’ teams attended the meetup, made presentations on their projects, and had brief Q&A sessions.Team members from every teams presented what problems their projects intended to solve, what they have done and what they planned to do in the future. Each of us has more or less learnt something from everything they narrated.
As the organizer of the 2019 Beijing iGEM Meetup, we hoped it would be a meaningful experience and valuable opportunity for all the teams to exchange ideas and learn from each other. In order to make the meetup achieve the goal, we did manifold preparation before it started. For example, we contacted our sponsor and reserved a proper assembly room together with team iBowu-China several days before the meetup. A few hours before the meetup began, we arranged the room chairs, provided sufficient food and drink, adjusted certain devices to ensure our meeting would be held in an enjoyable yet still methodical circumstance. Besides preparing the foundational condition for our meetup, we elaborated the instruction of the name list of all the teams and the process of the meetup which we designed specifically. As it turned out, our hard work was compensated handsomely.
After several minutes of ice-breaking, teams became more familiar with each other. As the organizer, our team was the second group to give the presentation of our experiments and human practices. After the last sentence was stated in the limited time, the advisor we invited gave us her opinion and suggestion of our experiment, which was about solving false negative responses in our reaction. Also, a student from other team casted a doubt on our way to deal with the used indicator, which made us think twice on reducing the possible pollution caused by the improper elimination of the indicator and the effectiveness of our solution: killing the phages by ultraviolet radiation. Presentations from other teams also intrigued us a lot and provoked more panoramic view of our experiment. For example, a team from Shenzhen was trying to design the most useful and strongest spider’s thread, which was inspired by the spider-man in Revenger. When the team leader introduced us the very attractive idea, almost every student in the room was curious about that. Their design perfectly met the demand of teenagers like us, which led us to consider who might be the proper audiences our project targeted at.
We believed not only us but also other teams have been benefited from the meetup, since they started to communicate more frequently with members from other teams, giving opinions towards the designs that had been discussed earlier or negotiating the up-coming collaboration with each other. We were proud of the achievement our meetup had achieved and surprised to find how incredibly precious lessons we just have learned from the communication, which gave us more inspiration and confidence to overcome the adversities that might happen when we conduct our experiment in the future.
Again, we valued the chance to be the organizer of the 2019 Beijing iGEM Meetup. Our time-management skills and organizing ability have been enhanced to a great degree. Moreover, the communication with other teams made our goal and process more explicit since we found our deficiencies and had the courage to overcome them.
