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From 2011.igem.org

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 bachelor's/master's degree. In those programs, students receive their bachelor's degree at the same time as their master's. We have accepted those students as undergraduates until they finish.

Post Graduate Master's Programs

In recent years, we saw the development of post-graduate master's programs. In those programs, students typically receive their undergraduate (and perhaps master's) degrees. On graduation they take jobs and then come back to school for a master's degree in Synthetic Biology. These students bring wonderful contributions to iGEM and our goal is to allow those students to continue to participate, first as post-graduate masters teams in the iGEM Undergraduate Division and perhaps eventually in a Masters Division.

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. Concerns about allowing multi-year thesis work in an undergraduate summer research competition were raised. They did not know what to do about the post-graduate master's students. For 2011, the judges will try to deal with this issue more carefully. We ask the post-graduate master's teams to identify themselves when they register.