Post Graduate Masters Teams

From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 17:43, 5 March 2011

IGEM is a synthetic biology design competition where teams of mostly undergraduate students design and implement biological systems based on standard parts.

What do we mean by mostly undergraduate students?

Undergraduate students are college students enrolled at a college or university. These are students who have not yet received their undergraduate degree when the team registers for iGEM in March.

So, a student who is part of an iGEM team in the spring can continue with that team.

Also, a common curriculum is the 5-year combined bachelors/masters degree. In those programs, students receive their bachelors degree at the same time as their masters. We have accepted those students as undergraduates until they finish.

Post Graduate Masters Programs

In recent years, we saw the development of post-graduate masters programs. In those programs, students typically receive their undergraduate (and perhaps masters) degrees. On graduation they take jobs and then come back to school for a masters degree in Synthetic Biology.

To be clear, our goal is to allow those students to participate in iGEM. But we need to find the right way. There is great variety in iGEM teams. They raise significantly different resources to participate, some pay their students stipends, some have charged their students tuition, some teams work for only 10 weeks during the summer, others start much earlier, some schools have established Synthetic Biology courses in their spring terms for their teams, some schools seem to ignore their teams.

However, last year, the judges were particularly sensitive to the level of advanced student participation in iGEM. They did not know what to do about the post-graduate masters students.

For 2011, the judges will try to deal with this issue more carefully. We ask the post-graduate masters teams to identify themselves when they register.