Team:UC Chile2/Fun protocols

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Revision as of 15:39, 1 August 2012

Protocol for the creation of a competent interdisciplinary team

Assembling a decent team in a restricted timespan can be somewhere between difficult to a completely impossible task. Not everyone has enough time to dress up in black leather, get an eye patch and go to the best of the best students saying I’m here to talk you you about the Avengers initative iGEM competition. That’s why we’ve gathered (all out of painful personal experience) some tips and tricks we’d like to share with you about getting together a group of amazing people and then turning them into heroes a team.

- First of all, you need the people. Gather about 10 or 12 interested younglings, the more dissimilar their majors, the better. Good strategies for finding such rare species include: posters all over campus, introductory talks on synthetic biology or iGEM, and flash courses during summer or spring break.

- Once you’ve gathered the group and actually managed to get all the members together somewhere, skip all awkward introductions such as “hi, my name is… I’m … years old and my major is ….” and get right to the really important questions: Who’s your favorite starter Pokemon? Which Harry Potter house suits you best? Why didn’t Gandalf just destroy the goddamn ring himself?

These questions constitute an awesome icebreaker, and actually contribute to the group’s first attempt at getting to know each other. Pushing them out of their comfort zone will catalyze interactions and they’ll probably get a good laugh together much faster than they would have during a normal introduction.

- Get a psychologist. Ask him/her to settle a focus group for you. He’ll be in charge of supporting and guiding you through this awkward stage. Tell each other why you are in the team; what you’d like to do, what you’d like to create. And then, write it. Write everything. And once you’re all set, write your group objective (one or two phrases should be enough). This objective should summon up everything you’d like to get out of this work experience. You want to build a better resume? Cool. Want to change your country’s vision on synthetic biology? Awesome. Want to take that giant lego trophy home? Of course you do. Now get those objectives down.

- Now you, as the group leader, should talk about each person in the team. If there was a selection process the members of the team had to undergo in order to win their places, tell them why they made the cut. What special capacity or talent got them there. And with that said, write a personal objective for each member. This will be incredibly motivating for everyone. Not only does it help each member feel that they’re an important addition to the group, it also helps them focus in their particular capacities. This is even more important in a multidisciplinary group, because everyone has a certain area of expertise they can develop and teach others about. More on that later.

- After your exhausting therapy session, go grab a bee-coffe. Or ice-cream. We went for ice-cream. Seriously. I mean, who doesn’t bond over b-ice-cream? Point to take: Don’t limit your group experience to labwork. If you only see your teammates during stressful, early-in-the-morning hours, you’ll end up associating them with that disgusting no-sleep feeling you should only get on midterms and finals. Try to party together a few times, bond both socially and intellectually. You’ll feel much more comfortable working with them if you can all share a laugh and talk about things other than bacteria for at least 10 minutes a day (no, fungus don’t count).

- Communicate. Get yourselves a facebook group, a twitter account, something that ensures all the team will get important information such as meetings, interesting papers, and etcetera.

- Charge a small (really small) fee and establish a coffee budget. When everyone’s falling asleep, or you simply can’t read more protocols, flee en masse and enjoy a nice cup of hot coffee/tea/chocolate/whatever/but not the bacteria/or yeast/really, don’t. Conversation, jokes and general awesomeness will ensue.

- If you’re working during vacations (as we did), at some point your group’s morale will hit an all-time low. Maybe your last experiment didn’t go that well. Maybe someone lost the lab notebook. Maybe you’ve been working for almost a month and you still don’t have a project. Here’s a good idea to cope with that: break the routine. Partying inside the lab could be the extreme version of this; what we did (and I strongly advice to do this) was changing a workday into a hang-out day. Instead of going to the lab, one of us offered his house and we all went there for a late breakfast. After insidious amounts of food, ideas started pouring out of us like pus from an infected wound. Uh, gross. But really. Breaking the routine is one of the most basic pieces of advice anyone related to creative-working would give you, though we scientists/engineers tend to ignore it.

- Work apart. You can’t expect everyone in the team to be in the lab 24/7, even less if you’re still on the first stages of bibliographic research. You don’t need to be all together to read a paper, you can give three or four days so that each member can read it whenever they have the time (remember they are students too, full of other responsibilities!) and then regroup to talk about it. And if time/location is a common problem, try the internet. Skype and G+ hangouts can be really good tools if they are used well.

- Divide to conquer. Make smaller groups. Give them specific tasks. If work is left to be done by anyone, it will surely end up being done by nobody. Establish ranks if necessary. Get yourself a manager (engineers are particularly good at this, and they tend to be quite a handful if they’re not fully occupied!)

- Put special capacities to good use. Not everyone has to do everything. If one of your engineers is also an artist, then perfect, have him design your logo. If your chemist is an emerging musician, ask him to write a song (we all know some teams have composed seriously amazing songs in the past years). Remember, you have a group made of entirely different people with entire different abilities. No one would make Hawkeye break a wall when you have Hulk. Or leave Iron Man hanging and order Captain America to hack into the penthagon. Poor Steve, I wouldn’t even let him alone with a microwave.

In short? You are all different people working towards the same objective. You all have different ways of working, thinking and behaving. Respect each other’s ways but be mature enough to adapt when you’re getting left behind. Don’t be afraid to speak up, and always ask for the tasks where you expect yourself to be the best at. And learn as much as you possibly can. About synthbio, about working in teams, about your partners. And march together towards victory! iGEM-ers Assemble!