Team:Cambridge/Society/report

Why iGEM? What kind of backgrounds does it attract

Advantages - freedom to research, inspiring, interdisciplinary

iGEM is unique in the amount of freedom given to undergrads to choose and organise their own research project. Shuna Gould made the point that teams also have to manage publicity and pitching their research to people with differing levels of specialist knowledge - valuable skills which are rarely developed in "normal" summer placement schemes.

Effect on future plans etc

are we excited by synbio enough to do it?

Staying involved?

We wanted to do a worthwhile investigation into how iGEM affects its participants. We know that surveys are fraught with difficulty if you intend to make concrete conclusions, but we saw contacting past iGEMMERs an essential first step in understanding the impact of iGEM on its alumni. We composed a brief online questionnaire in order to select victims...erm, brains to pick further about the impact of iGEM. Due to the busy nature of our project we chose people who we could access here in Cambridge (Shuna Gould and Justin Pahara), but we tried to broaden our investigation by also recording a skype conversation with Kim de Mora in Scotland, and a google chat with an iGEM alumnus in the USA who requested not to be used in the write up.