Valencia/Arnau opinion

From 2007.igem.org

I think it is important for us to show our thoughts on this competition and how they can improve the experience of the young entrepreneurs that will come on the following editions. As this is my second time I experience this competition I can compare it to the team and atmosphere of last year.

Registry and iGEM. This year we have had a few problems with some parts (see Adversities, for instance). This is a problem that has to be solved if we aim to a Standard Registry that works. Moreover, I am not personally fond of the skin that the iGEM wiki has this year, but I understand that it is an esthetical issue.

Valencia team. We were quite late preparing and building the team and summer caught us looking for some more people. This is one thing that we have to improve (in fact, some ideas are being currently discussed) if we want to be a good, interacting team that knows each other well. This takes me to the next thought: I am glad that this year we built a team that was smaller than last year’s and bore no egocentric behaviours. One has to be a good social engineer in order to build a team out of many strong hard-minded people. This year we have had many more interaction between the two halves of the team and we have had physicists doing minipreps and biologists running Mathematica’s simulations.

Work achieved. This year we aimed for a smaller project that could have many, many uses. That is why I am fond of the comparator. It has the potential that only great devices have. I am glad that we have achieved almost 75% of the work we aimed for, but I am deeply upset with myself and with luck (if that exists) because we have not finished it… I am happy of all the in silico work done and I am specially delighted of our wiki.