Only two days away from the competition

The Giant Jamboree competition 2014 is only two days away. Hynes Convention Center in Boston is hosting the event on 30 October – 3 November. Here, 2.500 Synthetic Biology researchers from 245 universities in 32 countries are participating. One of these teams is from NTNU. An iGEM team from the NT faculty The 2014 iGEM team from NTNU consists of eight students and three instructors. This year all students are part of the NT faculty, and everyone is either a student of the five-year master or three-year PhD program in biotechnology. Four of us (Camilla M. Reehorst, Line Aa. Omtvedt, HyeWon Lee and Ronja Hesthammer) finished our master program this year, and we have experienced the work with iGEM exciting and educational. Having a master’s degree does not mean you are finished learning, and we think that for most of us the “soup bowl of knowledge” has only just begun to be filled. These four students all undertook the laboratory part of their master’s at the Department of Biotechnology under the biopolymer chemistry branch. Not all of us have attained a job yet, but with the iGEM experience under our wings, the prospects seem a tad brighter. One of us (Eivind B. Drejer) is a fourth year student. He started to swim with the rest of the master student submarines, fully submerged in literature, in August 2014. His master thesis is under the systems biology branch of biotechnology (meaning a lot of computer fiddling), and he has not scheduled laboratory work in his thesis. His iGEM experience is therefore considered to supplement his degree to the point where future employers will tear at each other’s throats for such diverse experience in their workers. Two of us (Pål Røynestad and Elias H. Augestad) are third year students, and have not yet started work on master’s thesis. Pål is intrigued by the systems biology branch, and will start a computational and modelling-based assignment this autumn. Elias, on the other hand, is interested in molecular biology, and will start a master’s degree at the University of Copenhagen in September 2014. They might be the least experienced (based purely on age and amount of years spent studying biotechnology), but they are very valuable assets to our team. We would be lacking without them. Our last team member (Jacob Lamb) is a PhD student, and out-ranks us all. His field is molecular biology, and he has worked extensively with photosynthetic organisms. Not only does he actually know what he is doing in the lab, he is also a native English speaking type of guy, which means it sounds like he knows what he’s doing (unlike the rest of us that express ourselves with communication stutter steps). We also have three amazing instructors – Eivind Almaas, Rahmi Lale and Martin Hohmann-Mariott. They have participated in this competition before, both as instructors and judges. Their experience and knowledge is sorely appreciated, and to top it off they are very helpful!