What is iGEM?

There’s a semi-decent chance that if you’re enrolled at a Russell Group university in the UK and study something at least closely related to biology, such as biomedical sciences, chemistry, computer science etc. that you’ve heard mention of the phrase iGEM.

iGEM stands for the International Genetically Engineered Machine, and it’s a competition that runs annually out of Boston, Massachusetts encouraging undergraduate and postgraduate university students to get involved in biotechnology. This area of science has advanced such an incredible distance over a relatively short space of time that it’s vital we prepare the next generation of scientists to understand and further develop the tools we’ll need to use it. It usually takes place over a summer, in between academic years of study.

Team members from all over the world at the 2016 iGEM Giant Jamboree

Specifically iGEM is about synthetic biology, which fundamentally combines the principles of engineering (that being standardised systems with intercompatibility) with the techniques of molecular biology, bacteriology and an enormous array of other disciplines. This aim is realised through the use of custom-designed gene constructs that all have characterised functions, which can be combined together to create new constructs with new functions to solve a particular problem faced by society or develop a new tool.

"...just as the LEGO bricks in Beijing will match the LEGO found in Tennessee, all iGEM BioBricks are compatible no matter where on earth you stand"

Think of something like LEGO, for example. Each type of brick interlocks with virtually any other, the analogue in iGEM being ‘BioBricks’, which are genetic sequences with standardised prefixes and suffixes that allow them to be easily ligated together. Every year teams design more parts, building on the work of previous teams which is stored in the iGEM registry and available to everyone, not just competitors but research scientists all over the world. This is a crucial thing to realise, because just as the LEGO bricks in Beijing will match the LEGO found in Tennessee, all iGEM BioBricks are compatible no matter where on earth you stand.

Teams can vary in size and composition, but an example team might consist of say 10 students at undergraduate level. In my case, we had eight - myself and two further biologists, two biomedical science students and three from computer science. Five of us were in our second year of study, two from first year and one from third year at the time.

Our team assembled outside FabLab, Sunderland where we learned about 3D design

You then have to choose a problem to solve - Jake, one of our computer scientists came up with the idea of taking one of those fundamental aspects of iGEM (standardised systems) and trying to coming up with an electrobiological interface, and then producing free part designs that could be used to make them. The example given was build-your-own electronics kits such as those available from Hot Wires, usually given to children, wherein you make customisable circuits to perform a given task.

Long story short, it didn’t work very well but I’ll take you through the process. We learned how to design our own gene constructs using the SBOL Visual standard, had them synthesised and transform them into bacteria, test our constructs and record experimental data. There’s way too much to cover in this short article but I’ll give you a flavour of the sorts of things we got up to over our summer.
 

"Long story short, it didn’t work very well"

Lab training: You’ll no doubt receive full lab safety and technology briefings, and instructions on how to perform basic procedures alongside whatever specific experiments you wish to carry out. This is immensely valuable because it gives you a hands-on chance to get involved, and learn by success and failure. For example, I learned how to transform and culture cells, then measure growth and GFP fluorescence using industry standard equipment. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how valuable that would be to a prospective employer or supervisor.
 

You'll have to come up with novel ways to solve problems

3D Design: One really enjoyable aspect of our project was that because it inherently required physical devices for our electrobiological interface, we had to learn how to manufacture things. To achieve this, we developed partnerships with a local FabLab at the University of Sunderland, a design and fabrication workshop, eventually moving to OpenLab close by at Newcastle University. I learned how to design 3D print models and engineer them for our purposes, soldering everything together and building testing circuits.

Academic Conferences: Of course what you’re doing is fundamentally academic (at least in part) and you need to be able to talk to others about it! Your iGEM work is judged based on a few different aspects, including the novelty of your work and characterisation of your designs, but all of these have to be communicated during your final presentation. To practice for these, you can go to iGEM meetups with other teams over the summer - in our case we attended gatherings in Edinburgh, Paris and Westminster before delivering our final talk in Boston. We designed academic posters and handout materials, and feeling the culmination of everything on that stage was pretty overwhelming.

"You’re not just let loose on the world with big ideas and clumsy hands - you’ll work very closely with academic support"

Support: You’re not just let loose on the world with big ideas and clumsy hands - you’ll work very closely with academic support, in our case a mixture of lab technicians, lecturers and researchers. They’ll be with you every step of the way, training you in the labs, helping you practice your presentations and keeping your organised and on track during the summer. The closeness to these academics that you’ll build up is enormously valuable, because the exposure can’t even be approached during a normal teaching course. I know first-hand that our mentors put in astronomical amounts of effort to get us through the process, and we wanted to work hard to make them proud.

Our team post-speech on the stage in Boston, MA

This doesn’t even approach the enormity of everything we experienced during the summer but if you want to see more, head over to http://2016.igem.org/Team:Newcastle to see our wiki which covers everything in much more depth. If you’re interested in getting involved, be sure to ask your school and don’t hesitate to drop me a line at the contact form if you want to learn more.

How NOT to Choose A University

Just as there are many excellent ways to help you choose where you might want to study, there are a few that are abjectly, objectively terrible that I highly recommend you avoid.

1. League Tables

Let’s get this one out of the way first, league tables are a waste of mine, yours and everyone else’s time. They are inconsistent with each other, all use different metrics and the positions jump around so much year to year that you’d think these departments were in constant flux. This is obviously true to a very small extent given that staff and module content might change in their minutiae, but newspapers are writing them to sell newspapers and websites are writing them for clicks and ad revenue.

If you are going to insist on doing this, then just avoid choosing somewhere that’s right at the bottom of the list across multiple lists, but other than that I really don’t think it matters. Employers don’t care, I don’t care, and you shouldn’t care either. If you’ve found somewhere you want to go, then go there and don’t let anyone give you sh*t for it.

2. It’s close to home

This is admittedly a very tough one, and will be contentious - but ultimately it comes down to being somewhere where you can live away from home. I think that one of the great aspects of university living is that it gives you control and makes you responsible for your own life.

I went to Newcastle University, approximately 2-3 hours by car away from where I live, which was close enough for me that I could still get back urgently if necessary, but crucially still allowed me to shape my own existence. Being somewhere else, even if it’s just student accommodation, even for just the first year of the course is an experience that I think everyone should have.

In that time you’ll learn by necessity to cook, clean, socialise and fundamentally become a more rounded member of society (or at least in theory). This won’t be for everyone, and that’s perfectly fine, but living in the sheltered bubble of home will I think deprive you of certain things.

"Being somewhere else, even if it’s just student accommodation, even for just the first year of the course is an experience that I think everyone should have"

3. The Minimum Grade Offer

I will examine this topic in more depth in the future, but remember that the minimum UCAS or grade requirements for a course DO NOT indicate how good that course will be for you.

These requirements indicate two things at best: Firstly, they reflect how competitive entry is, because if they have a fixed number of places but a ton of applicants, they need to be more selective by definition and raising boundaries is a good way of eliminating a large number of people very quickly. Of course it does stand to reason that better courses will have more applicants, but that does not necessarily have to based on quality of teaching - there are more than likely a multitude of factors at play that warrant further investigation.

Secondly, universities are playing a game with the UCAS system that plays on the above point. Schools want to fill all their degree places because that means more money, so it is reasonable from their perspective to inflate the entry requirements. More students will then assume that it’s a better course, apply for it, subsequently fail to make the grades, but the university will take them anyway. It’s a devious game but it’s easy to see how unwilling students can be preyed upon like this.
 

4. Your Parents Said So

The absolute worst reason of all, and something I’ve noticed multiple times when giving tours of Newcastle. Your parents, while they love you very deeply and I have no doubt want the absolute best for you, do not share your mind. They do not know as well as you do where it is you want to go and study, and if you are not able to stand up to them and tell them that, realise that it’s probably a good indicator of worse problems to come later on in life.

This is usually a particular type of parent, and it can lead to uncomfortable standoffs, but it’s far better to get it out the way - I myself have taken parents aside while doing tours and tried to recommend that they back off and allow the student to ask me questions. In cases where it’s plainly obvious that the applicant doesn’t want to be here, I’ll tell them that too, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Go where makes YOU happy, not your parents. If at all possible, go to open days without them, and then have a second visit with them in tow if you’re still interested.
 

How to Choose A University

Here in the United Kingdom there are currently more than a hundred universities, each of which represents a viable place to study for new applicants. In this article I'll go through a few ways you can narrow down your search in time for the UCAS deadlines.

Keble College, University of Oxford

1. What subject?

The first and potentially easiest way of choosing your university is deciding what you might like to study. Here’s an easy exercise - if you’re applying with A levels or some equivalent through UCAS, open up a spreadsheet in Excel, write down the names of some universities (choose them at random if needs be!) and see if each place on the list even offers the course you want. Mark down the grades you need at each school and then rinse and repeat for as many subjects as you want - this is a nicely organised way of working through it and will make it easier to compare your options.

You’ll normally find all the relevant information on the university website, such as the aforementioned grade requirements, details of the application process (entrance exams, interviews etc.) along with aspects of the course that might be specific to that school - this is a great means of learning more about what each institution offers and might entice you towards or even repel you away from a particular place. This sounds negative at first, but in both cases it makes the final considerations simpler.

 

2. The Russell Group

Listen, I am not (or at least would not like to think I was) an elitist when it comes to education - I was happily state-schooled, and I have met people from an enormous range of backgrounds in the academic sphere who were all fantastically competent. By and large, I do not think that whether a university is part of the Russell group should sway your decision.

However, in my opinion, if you are considering biology or chemistry I would perhaps let it play on your mind just a tad. My reasoning is this: In such a university, your lecturers are more likely to have their own academic research going on which will enhance your chances of extracurricular opportunities in this area (see point 4). I think there are sufficiently few people taking maths and physics courses at present that demand exceeds supply for competent graduates in these areas, but this does not appear to be true as a whole across the sciences.

This is very much a generalisation, and many people will disagree, but this goes for all subjects of study - if you think that academia as the endpoint could be what you desire, (or industry research for STEM fields), then I think I would be doing you a disservice by not at least suggesting that you look into this aspect.

The IGEM competition as of present is only entered by research-focused UK universities

3. Non-Academics

Of course you’ll only spend so much time studying (although at least in my case far less than I’d have everyone believe) so find out what you can do in your downtime. The best way to do this is to look up the students’ union website, with societies being a great place to start - most universities will have a ton, ranging from sports clubs and subject societies to musical theatre, liberation groups and even more esoteric things like beer brewing and beekeeping.

As a general piece of advice, if you’re thinking about going to university and studying all day every day, you’re setting yourself up for failure and in all honesty I think you’d be wasting your time. You need to unwind (and I say this as somebody who is chronically bad at doing so) - find new things to interest you and it’ll make your time better spent and your experience all the richer for doing so.

4. Career goals

Another potential way to look at this is to see what the graduates of the university are doing, which rings true if your subject naturally leads into a career and even if it doesn’t. In the former case, for example if you were wanting to study something like engineering or my own subject of molecular biology, does the institution have good networking links and extracurricular opportunities? Competitions and research projects over holidays are a fantastic way of getting a leg up on other students both during your degree and when applying for positions after university.

Equally if you fall into the latter camp, perhaps doing a humanities based subject or something unusual, the same rules apply. They can be extended however by linking to the previous point - what opportunities with societies are there to enhance your skillset and expose you to new concepts that might help you steer your trajectory a little bit if you feel you might need it.

5. Visit It

It’s one of those very strange things which is often very difficult to quantify, but I think that by far the best way to choose your university is to visit it and have a good look round. Remember that you’ll usually be spending at least three years of your life there and paying through the nose to do it. While my entry to university was somewhat unorthodox, I was lucky enough to be familiar with Newcastle already and I knew that I could be happy there.

Book onto an open day (these are usually held several times per year) and make sure to check out the buildings for the courses you think you might apply for, the student accommodation, the union, anywhere you think your daily life might take you - even if you’ve missed the official days, get in touch with the admissions office and they may be able to arrange a tour.

With that in mind, leave yourself an afternoon spare to wander around the city and get a feel for things - oftentimes you’ll come to a sense of ‘knowing’ that this is where you want to be.