Difference between revisions of "Team:Korea U Seoul/Collaborations"

Collaborations

Korea_U_Seoul had collaborated with ‘KoreaSonyeodul team from Hankuk Foreign Language High School. ‘KoreaSonyeodul’ is a team made up with 7 high school girls, and this year is their first time participating iGEM. We, Korea_U_Seoul team has participated iGEM since 2009, therefore our persistent experience on iGEM and synthetic biology-related activities could help them starting things up, through this collaboration.

The collaboration was mainly proceeded in two categories: mentoring new high school team, and experimental exchanges.

1. Mentoring a new high school team

After several contacts via e-mail, we could finally have a chance to meet KoreaSonyeodul. The first meet up was held in June, at Korea University. Since Korea_U_Seoul and KoreaSonyeodul are the only Korean team this year, it was in fact a quite meaningful session that all the Korean participants were gathering.

First part of the meet up was about introducing our own project. Korea_U_Seoul prepared a brief speech on who we are, what we have done in last 7 years with iGEM, and our plans for this year’s project.

Next was KoreaSonyeodul. They proposed what they had in mind, and it was a brilliant idea so we actively participated with bunch of questions and answers coming and going.

Besides contents of the project itself, collaboration session was meaningful enough in the means of giving a real help to difficulties most of iGEM newbies are facing.

We went through the realistic preparations on iGEM jamboree participation, such as registration, transportations and accommodation reservations together with advices of former participants from our team. Also, we together checked the important schedules with essential requirements such as team/personal registration, wiki freeze and part submission. Especially, since experiment schedules often require a long time with many variables occurring in real time, we could give advices on planning the overall project to KoreaSonyeodul which didn’t have much lab experiences before.

More than filling the requirements and essential preparations, we could deeply communicate about difficulties in running such a big project by our own as a student. Especially in the sense of handling a whole project, we discussed about how Korea_U_Seoul is dealing with our own team management and organization. Dividing team into smaller groups and having weekly communication session where each group exchange their group’s progress could harden the teamwork and help Korea_U_Seoul to be a long-lasting team, which was the most important thing in overall.

2. Experimental exchanges

The members of KoreaSonyeodul came to our lab to look around and have a meeting with our PI. They consulted us about their project, and we helped them to schedule their experiments. Since they did not have their own lab, they shared the lab with us. They never had any experience with lab work such as cloning, so we taught them how things are done. We taught and helped with their part cloning(Restriction enzyme cloning) and LIC cloning. We also helped the with their part registration and submission.