Team:Cambridge/Society/report

Just how effective has iGEM been as means to engage more scientists to work in synthetic biology? What has its effect been on its participants, and the field as a whole? By making some advances to answer this question, valuable insight can be made into what similar outreach programmes can work to achieve, and what they can do to improve their effectiveness.

To this end, a short online questionnaire was designed and distributed by the Cambridge iGEM team in 2011, with the aim of creating a ‘census’ of the students who have taken part in iGEM teams over the past 8 years of the competition’s history. With over 60 respondents, we have amassed a sufficient amount of data to make some valid analyses; although we do urge caution against drawing any broad conclusions about the competition, since our sample is only a statistically insignificant 2% of the total population of iGEM alumni. However, on an individual scale, we do believe that we have a lot of interesting tales to tell.