"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" – Murphy’s Law
We often find that even though we try to account for every potential problem, there is always one that should have been obvious. This scenario is inevitable and more often than not, will happen at the worst time possible. How we handle these unforeseen problems can result in either a successful mission or a critical mission failure. As a team competing for the first time, there was no shortage of these scenarios and as a good team should, we came together and quickly found solutions for the problems. As the summer passed, our knowledge and experience grew and we decided to reach out to the teams in our track to compile all of our collective experiences and perspectives on the iGEM experience and put it together to create a tool for future team’s use.
In this guide you will find multiple team’s perspective on topics such as design, laboratory work, funding, team building and the suggested approach to potential problems that can emerge. However, our vision for this guide is to not only provide insight and solutions to some of these unforeseen problems but to also challenge the way in which we perform established practices used in the preparation for the iGEM competition. In future we hope to evolve this guide into a forum where all iGEM teams can contribute to each other’s knowledge, because we believe the main goal of the iGEM competition, at its core, is to provide students with an opportunity to learn and grow the scientific community.
