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

Parent's Committee

We are a team of teenagers that normally get to school at 7:00 a.m. and finish around 1:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m.… but when we started getting involved with the iGEM project, our departure time extended, we stayed up at night for longer hours, and spent most of our time working at school and going to other several places. Our parents knew we had joined a team called “iGEM“, but had no idea of what we were doing, or why we had suddenly stopped being at home most of the time. Some of them got angry because we were losing sleep; we were all stressed out because of all the work that had to be done, and our parents were clueless about what was going on.

So we decided to organize a presentation for them, where we would explain all they needed to know about iGEM, our team, our project and the work we had been doing the last several months. This informative presentation, given by us, was necessary to present all of our work and to get all of the support from our parents, in order to assist the Jamboree on June 28th and 29th. We wanted our parents to see that we had not been wasting time during the whole semester.

We first explained what the iGEM competition was; the three divisions that exist, and the different application areas that we could work with. We presented a basic explanation of what synthetic biology is, what our project consisted of, and the activities we had been doing to complement our project. Later on, our teachers and instructors mentioned how this, in general, was a multidisciplinary project, involving working in the lab, human practices, safety, software, math model, wiki design… and how each of us had been assigned to the area we were more comfortable working in, using all of our different abilities to contribute on one same project.

At the end, all of our parents seemed happy with what we presented, and concluded that iGEM was an experience that we would remember for the rest of our lives and a great opportunity to develop new ideas in the future.