Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Associations
Associations
Association named Aalto-Helsinki Synthetic Biology ry was founded by the Aalto-Helsinki 2016 team. In order to guarantee its continuity, the new board was selected from the members of the 2017 team. The main purpose of the organization is to enable better handling of the team’s finances, but it has also been a great way to come to know some of the members from the three previous years' teams while having some fun.
Our team has had the opportunity to network with the like-minded people that are Aalto-Helsinki alumni while bouldering, building robots, pitching, stand up paddling, and having an academic table party. This sort of networking is crucial in a small country like Finland, where synthetic biology is still relatively unknown and professional circles in the field are extremely small.
In order to engineer something else than cells for a while, Aalto-Helsinki members from the current and previous years' teams formed a team to combat in hands-on engineering challenge called RobotUprising. We tried to use the opportunity to spread the word about synthetic biology by using Aalto-Helsinki as a team name and explaining a little bit about iGEM and synthetic biology e.g. to the representatives of KONE corporation before our pitch, and we placed second in the KONE pitching side challenge. Practising pitching before the Giant Jamboree is always a good idea and some of the speakers of the event were actually from the bioindustry. Some of the previous members were also organizing the event, so Aalto-Helsinki was well represented! Photo by Veeti Haapsamo.
Another way for Aalto-Helsinki to help connect the Bio people of Finland has been attending meetings of Bio-community, an association to be in the near future after completing the formalities of founding an association in Finland. The idea of the community is to bring together students, professors, companies and other people of the bioscience field, focusing on biotechnology. An important difference when compared to the other existing associations would be that it is not meant for only companies, or for students from certain study programs or a certain university, as the existing associations, but it would instead bring all of the above together. The association might be able to get a shared laboratory space from Aalto University in collaboration with Merja Penttilä from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, and it will most likely offer excursions, get-together happenings for bio people, lectures and afterworks in order to enable better networking of the field’s professionals. There have been three meetings of which all have been attended by an Aalto-Helsinki 2017 member. The meetings have been held 31.5., 21.8. and 9.8.2017.
