Carnegie Mellon was able to host a meet up on Saturday, September 6th. A total of six teams and about 50 students attended including a high school team that the University of Pittsburgh had been mentoring. The following teams were in attendance:
University of Michigan
University of Michigan Software Team
Pennsylvania State University
University of Pittsburgh
Montgomery High School
Carnegie Mellon University
The day started with each team presenting their respective projects while the other teams wrote down feedback and questions. Next we transitioned to a Q&A panel of past participants. Some Carnegie Mellon advisors as well as some members of the Michigan teams had previously participated in iGEM and answered questions relating to the Jamboree, forming a team, picking a project, etc.
As the final part of the meet up, all of the teams socialized and discussed projects while rotating through the workshops we had set up. There were initially three schedule workshops: poster, public speaking and wiki. However, the representative for the poster workshop was unable to attend. The presentation and wiki workshops were very successful. Professor Julia Deems of Carnegie Mellon specializes in communication. She was able to give each team feedback specific to their presentation on what they can do to make more of an impact at the Jamboree. The wiki workshop was led by Jonathan deWerd, a masters student in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, he was able to provide feedback to any teams that had questions about putting together their wiki.
Over the course of the day, all of the teams were able to learn more about other iGEM projects as well as advance their own project further due to the conversation and feedback that comes from collaboration.
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