Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/HP-Cideb-Newbies

Invitation to Newbies

Just like we did last year, students from second semester were invited to an informational meeting about iGEM, and how they could have the chance of being part of the team CIDEB 2014. Since we are having our graduation next month, and the current team of 2013 is leaving after this year’s competition, we have the responsibility of recruiting students that’ll join next year’s team; to keep the project alive and going. But most students at CIDEB had no idea that iGEM even existed, so we had to tell them.

We arranged a meeting where our instructor, one of the few who contributed to the implementation of the project iGEM in our school, Heber Torres, would inform a gathered group the basic things about the project and what they needed to do to get into the team. For this, we went all around the school telling people about the meeting, using posters and ads. We went to each of the classrooms and stood at the front door of the school; we told groups of people, individual people and even teachers, so that they could tell their students.

Thanks to this, even if only a few people were actually interested in synthetic biology, at least everyone would’ve heard the word “iGEM“ at some point. People would be curious, assist the meeting, and then decide if it was something they’d like to be part of or not. And they’d at least know what iGEM was about, or what it had to do with.

Nevertheless, the principal objective was to recruit next year’s team, hoping they’ll come with newer and better ideas for the 2014 competition.

Nevertheless, the principal objective was to recruit next year’s team, hoping they’ll come with newer and better ideas for the 2014 competition.

Interview to CIDEB students

This consisted in an interview about selected topics of synthetic biology and small facts about iGEM. We asked several questions to different students from CIDEB, from the UANL, that would help us get an idea of how many people know about synthetic biology and iGEM. Some students were previously selected and aware that they would be interviewed, but had no idea of what the topic was about; other students were chosen randomly. All of the interviews were conducted within the school, in mid-April.

Synthetic biology is not a common topic that everyone has knowledge about, so through the interview we wanted to determine how much people from our own school knew about synthetic biology. We had no intention to obtain accurate information that would allow us to create precise graphs or statistics to represent our whole high school; we just wanted to have an idea of how much work we needed to do in spreading the knowledge about synthetic biology to people we live with every day; how many people were interested in it, and how many were actually aware of the existence of iGEM.