iGEM 2023

Quick CV summary

What is iGEM 2023?

iGEM stands for Internationally Genetically Engineered Machine, a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of synthetic biology. Each year iGEM hosts a worldwide competition for undergraduate, graduate, and overgraduate students, and in 2023 over 400 teams competed.

How did I end up in a synthetic biology competition?

At my campus, a student group competes in this international competition. To achieve great results, they need a multidisciplinary team capable of doing field research, laboratory work, engineering, entrepreneurship, content creation, and computer science skills. You can check their social media here.

I applied for the team with an emphasis on helping them out with the content creation, checking the spelling and grammar of their writings, and possible translation of their works. I did not intend to help them out design and develop their “wiki” page for the competition, because I never really enjoyed website development. However, because I was the first CS student to apply for the 2023 competition, I was immediately assigned as Team Lead for the Wiki Team.

First meeting with the iGEM Team (I'm to the left)
First meeting with the iGEM Team (I’m to the left)

The responsibilities of the Wiki Team are to design and develop a webpage that contains all the work done by the whole team. This “wiki page” contains all the project details, and it is indispensable for the judging session. You can check more details here.

What did I end up doing?

We had more than 6 months for the project. So I started by making meetings with the different teams of Lab, Hardware, Entrepreneurship, and Media, to get a sense of what the project was about, how to collaborate and figure out our responsibilities.

Later on, I started to develop a prototype web page in Figma, with the end goal of establishing a layout for each page, a page Header, a page Footer, and an identity in colors and style. After this, the other two members of the Wiki team were handed tasks in who creates the footer, the heading, the hero image, etc. I have to give credit to the other team members because they were recent CS graduates with industry experience, so they knew when to call for a meeting to assign tasks and have consistency on the side of web development.

Zoom meeting with the Wiki Team, checking our Figma
Zoom meeting with the Wiki Team, checking our Figma

When several months passed, and the other teams already started to have content for the Wiki page, we agreed to create Google Docs for each team/page of the wiki and have them write their works. After each doc was finished, and with the help of some members from the student group, we proofread and gave feedback, so that the content was well written and it was what the competition and judges expected.

Meeting and talking about the project with all the teams
Meeting and talking about the project with all the teams

Due to the other team members of the Wiki Team having a job, they couldn’t work on the Wiki. So I was responsible for passing all the written content from each team to the wiki. It was nothing fancy, I kept everything simple while working with HTML and Bootstrap. And the deployment of the web page was automatically done with GitLab.

Me! On the Wiki
Me! On the Wiki

Final thoughts

I did end up enjoying this project. It was very fulfilling because I ended up working with a great team that won a Gold Medal and got nominated for the Inclusivity Award. They were very passionate, and they were very grateful for my work. At the very end of the project, it was hard, because I ended up being the only one working on the wiki. But with the support of the whole team, I finished the project. I wish I could have done something better, more than simple, but with my past web development skills it wasn’t possible.

The finished wiki can be found here.

The project repository can be found here.

Our team winning gold at Paris (TecMonterreyGDL)
Our team winning gold at Paris (TecMonterreyGDL)
Nominated for the Inclusivity Award
Nominated for the Inclusivity Award