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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?

1. Teams consisting of a less than a 2:1 ratio of undergraduates to postgraduates will be evaluated as postgraduate teams.
   
2. Postgraduate teams are eligible for the Postgraduate Grand Prize, Medals, Special Awards, and Track/ Area Awards.
   
3. Students in the final year of a 5-year combined bachelor's/master's degree who have not yet received a bachelor’s degree are considered undergraduates. If they have received a Master’s degree before or during iGEM, they are considered postgraduates.

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.

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 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.