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Team:METU Turkey/hp-in-metu.html
From 2013.igem.org
Although METU has been participating in iGEM for 6 years now, iGEM never caught the attention it deserved, mainly because of the technical roots of our school and the fascinating engineering clubs and their projects.
It was time for this trend to change.
Click on topics and pictures to see detailed information.
Synthetic Biology Day
A good way for us to hear out new implications or views and of course make our name heard was to hold a seminar. While we dwindled if it were going to be a flop, we were positively surprised! We nearly filled the saloon and everyone, most importantly us were fascinated by the new perspectives provided to us by our speakers, Prof. Dr. Gülay Özcengiz, Dr. Ozlem Darcansoy İşeri, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mesut Muyan, Assist. Prof. Dr. Turgay Tekinay, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Çağdaş D. Son , Assist. Prof. Dr. Yeşim Aydın Son.
This chance to educate ourselves, meet new people and explain ourselves was more then ideal.
SynBio Party
After the Synthetic Biology Day seminars, we gave a party, SynBio party, to express ourselves as a team in a more informal way. We wanted to meet new people interested in the field and what better way to make new acquaintaces then having a beer together and dancing? Without professors, with our lab coats,lab glasses and our hand-made iGEM shot racks filled with colorful coctails in test tubes (they were fresh tubes btw). With about 200 guests, the party was an immense success! It was also nice to fuse together as a team and also we were able to raise some funds. Even thinking about that wild night brings up good memories.
SPRING Festival in METU brings lots of happiness, energy and generosity. We should have informed people about what we did, but how? While encountering METU students and teachers unaware of the competition frustrated us, it gave us an idea. What better way to make your name heard then to put on costumes, run across the campus distributing home-made cookies? Decision of making cup cake to grabbing the people attention to Synthetic Biology was a great idea. Also, wearing marginal clothes made people curious about iGEM. All those rush, we tried to enjoy festival. At next day, we realized that clothes and distributing cakes makes the iGEM permanent in their mind. We kept doing those till the end of festival.
Relations with other Student Clubs
We met many student clubs but got really good along with the METU Machine and Inovation Student Club. They are as the name implies mechanical engineering students and we founded a Bioengineering group together. We helped them to understand biological events in detail and they help us to understand machine and engineering principles,so first we gave a lecture about DNA, recombination techniques and techniques that we use regularly in the lab. Then, they gave a lecture about basic principles of machines, logic of engineering and techniques that could be used in biological events. Every week, we tried to arrange an online journal club to improve our basic knowledge in both ways, one week we discused a biological paper, while the other week we discussed a subject related to machine or engineering science. We also arranged a lab session for them where the engineers could test their newly gained basic theoretical background. This lab session were classified as a “demo” because we had used up most of our resources so they used a special secret solution called “ tap water” :) . Now, its our turn to visit their atelier but due to our dense work in the lab we could not visit them :(
