Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/hp enlacecientifico

After an advance in science is achieved, the scientist’s community is obligated to share their discoveries. In the specific case of México, there are many programs and business eager to share those achievements.

The company “Enlace Científico” sent an invitation to the CIDEB-UANL 2014 team to participate in a conference at the Facultad de Agronomía (Agronomy’s Faculty) in collaboration with other institutions. This conference represented a great opportunity to create relationships with other institutions, encourage people to create their own iGEM teams and talk about our experiences, feeling and opportunities to grow trough the competence.

In order to achieve these objectives, the conference was planned and presented by the older students in the team, those who had participated at an iGEM competition before; we created a presentation with the information of CIDEB-UANL 2013 including goals, troubles, experiences and most importantly, what happened with all members after finishing the project. We worked with a representative of IGEM-UANL 2014 team, a representative of TecMonterrey team and some others. When the conference began, the director of the company “Enlace Científico” presented each of the speakers and gave a general idea of what the iGEM competition was.

After that, the first speaker was a representative from IGEM-UANL 2013. He gave a more detailed explanation about the iGEM competition and he showed details about the project of his team, his experiences and achieved goals. Consecutively, we showed our presentation; it contained 3 main stages: (1) what the competition was, (2) who were part of the CIDEB-UANL 2013 team and how they were distributed, (3) which were the difficulties and goals achieved, and finally, (4) what happened after.

For the first stage we introduced the competition information and its history, about the first participants and the amount of teams participating today.

Afterwards, we showed an image of the CIDEB-UANL 2013 team’s members and explained the way we were organized in order to achieve each important part: Math model, Human practices, Safety, etc.

For the 3rd part, we explained the initial difficulties of the creation of the project, mostly about the ideas that were a possibility but didn’t evolve into the real project. The idealization of a viable project is the most difficult part of the entire work because most of the time an idea can be very difficult to achieve or another team could have done it already.

The impact of this conference was showed by the students. First of all there were a variation of questions about the projects and the experiences obtained by participating in a project of this category. There were students that wanted to create a new team but planned to participate until 2015.

It was an event we took advantage of because we shared moments with other iGEM teams, talked about our projects and at the same time, we encouraged students to join the iGEM community.