Notebook - Week 1

Monday, April 30

The first day! After some introductions and icebreaker activities, Kevin (our Team Manager) gave us a brief introduction of the team structure and showed us ho to make our iGEM accounts. After that, we started off our iGEM adventure by researching some past iGEM teams and we individually gave a presentation on the iGEM team that we chose, just to get all of the team members up to speed with iGEM and to get some really cool ideas from past iGEM teams!

In the afternoon, we continued brainstorming from a list that we had come up with during the school year. we also came up with some new potential project ideas. To finish off the day, Kevin showed us an old iGEM jamboree presentation.

Tuesday, May 1

In the morning, we continued brainstorming and went through all our ideas page-by-page. In the afternoon one of our past team members came in to give a presentation about sponsorship, and get us off on the right foot.

Wednesday, May 2

Today we focused more on brainstorming, and went through our ideas to try and narrow them down to only the most awesome ones. We also started our research into possible sources of sponsorship.

Thursday, May 3

In the morning we spent some time looking at past posters and wikis by various teams and brainstormed some ideas for our own. Also, one of our advisors, Dr. Chin-Sang, dropped by and we chatted about recent synbio headlines, including making 4-letter codons in E. coli. That night we had our first QGEM social: trivia at the Grad Club! We didn't win anything but our team (named C. elegance FTW) was awesome and we had a great time.

Friday, May 4

Today was spent focused on one thing: narrowing down our list of potential projects. After long hours of debate and many pros and cons charts we finally narrowed it down to 6 possible projects to research in further detail next week.