Berkeley Engineering Blogs

Long time since my last post, no?

I bring you all pictures that I’ve accumulated thus far from the iGEM Jamboree. I’m hoping to add a few more pictures to the album later once we get more pictures of the computational team (us!) and just pictures around MIT.

http://picasaweb.google.com/naderadez/IGEM#

Stay tuned.

After a long day of talking about our project, we just found out a few hours ago that we are one of the six finalist teams! We will join Caltech, Freiburg, Harvard, NYMU-Taipei, and Slovenia in presenting again tomorrow to all of the iGEM participants. After all of the practice that we have had in the past two days with presenting, answering questions, and presenting our poster, we are prepared to put on a good presentation this year. Unlike last year when the Berkeley team’s participants and instructors needed to significantly revise their presentation between Saturday and Sunday, we only had to make a couple of minor changes and we are set to go. As a result, everyone is able to relax, party, sleep, or do whatever they please.

Our presentation today clearly went very well. The interest level seemed high and the types of questions that people asked us indicated that they not only understood what we did, but also that they thought what we were doing was useful (we had questions about whether and how our system would be compatible with similar lab procedures that others may use). After we finished our presentation and Q&A, we could just see how pleased Chris, Terry, and Jin were with how everything turned out. They had been extremely supportive throughout the entire process, but it was more satisfying than ever to hear that they were content with how the presentation turned out.

Today has been a very exciting and rewarding day, but without a doubt it has left most of us quite tired (as I type from Bing & Aron’s hotel room right now, Aron has fallen asleep on the bed right behind me). I myself am quite exhausted from all the talking and standing up that I did throughout the day today. I am going to sign off in favor of resting up and getting ready for an exhilarating and eventful day tomorrow. I am excited to see what happens and I hope that tomorrow will be just as rewarding and satisfying as today!

It’s 3:15 pm Eastern time, and our presentation is scheduled to start in 45 minutes.  We have spent the day watching other presentations and getting a feel for what other teams have been doing.  Presenting late in the day is a little nerve-wracking.  

I have also been interviewing people about their opinions on synthetic biology, its attachment to iGEM, and friction between the open source philosophies and the realities of the technicalities of doing the research and the needs of the researchers for characterized systems, parts, and devices.

Here is a pictoral depiction of our day so far:

Beautiful Stada Center!!

Searching, searching for presentations.

Last minute practice, this time with hard hats.

JAMBOREE DAY ONE!

Free coffee delivered, opening remarks spoken, and first teams speaking–the iGEM competition is off to its start.  The rooms for the teams to present are too small for the crowds who want to see them, so there are many overflow areas for others to see them–although unfortunately there are usually seven teams speaking at once, so we’ll have to wait to watch the filmed footage (posted on youtube?) to see everyone who is presenting here today.

Here’s a little distraction, though, in the form of Clonebots viral marketing…

Jamboree–Day Zero.

Tomorrow’s the big day, and today has been spent re-calibrating and going over the presentation and Q&A session that we’ll have at 4:00 tomorrow afternoon.  

We were schooled on proper body language and comportment rules for the presentation.  

Molly’s cutting up some Clonebots stickers for attachment to our construction hats and other important sticker-applied areas.

Clonebots:  a new example of viral marketing.

Terry teaches us the importance of thinking like Batman while presenting to a room of scientists.

…while Bing, Madhvi, Christie, and I make last minute changes on our powerpoint presentation. Â

Thursday night found us sitting around in the Oakland Airport, playing sudoku and utilizing precious free wifi before setting off for a night flight to Boston.  We have spent the week finalizing our presentation and our poster, so everyone is a bit exhausted at the beginning of the journey.

Action shot of Bing in the airport.  Bam!

Dramatic cell phone shot.

No action or drama here.  Just sudoku.  The adventure begins!

Our presentations (those of the Wet Lab and the Computational Team) are both on Saturday, and we have all of Friday to practice the presentations over and over, to make sure that they are informative, but captivating, and most of all that we keep them within the 20 minute time limit…  There will be a question and answer session after the presentation, and this is a new concept to many of us, so Terry and Chris will be coaching us on how to reach into the resources of the work we have been doing to answer questions effectively and interestingly. 

We came into the predawn world of drizzly Boston at 5:30 am, surprisingly not too grumpy and even a bit cheery. We were, however, in great need of some shut-eye to get rid of that red-eye to face the rest of the day full of practice presentations.    

You can feel how extreme the predawn Boston was with the blurriness of this picture.

Jamboree, here we come!