IGEM:Peking/2007/Experience-colletcion

Questions From Catherine Goodman

• noticed that this was your first year in the competition. What inspired you to join in, and what was it like getting involved in the program from a logistical standpoint?

• I read on your website that you all spent several months brainstorming ideas. How did you decide on the final projects?

• What are the various backgrounds of the students on the team? How many were planning to become scientists/engineers before the competition, and has that changed since?

• Did you find it intimidating or exciting (or both) to try to come up with ideas for scientific projects and make them work? Did you find any problems in communicating (intellectually) between people from different scientific backgrounds?

• What was the most interesting aspect of the whole process?

• Will you participate again next year, and if so, what have you learned from your experience this year that will help you next year?

Answers From Qinsi Zheng

• At the begining, we have about 10 ideas presented by various team members, including in-vivo evolution of drugs and storing and searching information in E. coli. After about two months' discussion, we decide to do two projects, which is Switch and Count. I think the most interesting thing is at first we just do these projects seperately, but later we found that we can tell a story as bacterial assembling line to discribe our two projects.

• Most of our team members are biology students, but there is two students studying chemistry, and one studying physics.

My name is Qinsi Zheng, and I am an undergraduate student in chemistry department. Before the competition I am not a biologist at all, I just thought Synthetic Biology is cool, so I joined it. I need to learn a lot, but I think it is not so difficult. Here I encourage non-biological stidents to join iGEM. It is fun, cool, promising and not too difficult, but of course you should love it and work hard on it. Before the competition, I was thinking about becoming a scientist, but not so sure then. During the competition, I think I feel good while doing research and cooperating with others. Now I am quite sure that I will become a scientist or an engineer.

• I will. I think our project next year should be about a more practical problem, for example, health and enviorment. The iGEM is an engineering competition, and I think a good engineer should identify the market need and then provide a product. I like the Slovenia's project this year, which is about curing HIV. It quite matches the market need.(By Qinsi)