Third year Biosciences student Alice Tomlinson is our third interviewee from the gold medal winning iGEM team. Here’s an insight into her experience of the competition.
Firstly, what was your role in the team and what were your main contributions to the project?
I did some lab work and I also did a bit of outreach so I contacted all of the MPs, and then I did similar things to the others in the lab such as making gel plates and growing bacteria and that kind of thing.
How would you describe the overall experience of competing in iGEM?
It was great because we were working in a team so we had lots of people doing different things, and if you didn’t get time to do something, you could just ask someone else. It was a really great experience actually, you get to know lots of people that you didn’t know before.
What was it like seeing the project develop from something that was just a concept, into reality?
It was just really amazing because when we started off we felt completely clueless. We had a PhD student helping us, just giving us basic knowledge about what to do in the lab and day to day stuff. You could see that as we went on we became more autonomous and by the time we were halfway through, we were using terms really offhand.
As we got to know each other better we became a unit where everyone knew what their strengths were, so you knew who to ask for what, and by the end we knew our project more or less inside out. Through the summer we learnt a lot about what we were doing – it was great seeing the whole thing from start to finish.