Mentoring a team initially sounded to be a little intimidating for us because we weren’t very experienced at mentoring teams. But it turned out to be a really great experience for our entire team, as we grew more comfortable with the IISER Mohali team. So much so, that we now are really confident about mentoring new teams and look forward to it in years to come.
IISER Mohali Team members were really awesome, we had a great time mentoring them and we wish them all the best for all their future endeavours in the field of Synthetic Biology.
Mr. Mahendra Sahare is a PhD student, doing a humanities project under a Supreme Court lawyer, Dr. Naveen Thayyil. He has been in collaboration with iGEM IIT Delhi since 2015. Together, we have worked on the aspect of ‘Ethical Scientific Practices’. It was during his visit to IISER Mohali, that he came back with a collaborative offer for iGEM IIT Delhi to mentor IISER Mohali. We took this opportunity to increase the culture of iGEM in India and wholeheartedly helped them in the establishment of an iGEM club at their Institute.
On our return from the Giant Jamboree 2016, our team members gave a presentation scheduled at IISER Mohali. Three members of our team, Kshitij Rai, Tarun Mahajan and Angad Chandel went to IISER Mohali to give a session on emergence of synthetic biology and our previous projects. We discussed with them at length all about iGEM since they were inexperienced at it, and also helped them getting registered. Here is the link of the Presentation ( https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2017/b/bd/T--IIT_Delhi--IISER_Mohali_PPT.pdf )
We helped them throughout the working period with problems pertaining to WetLab through skype calls. We also told them about different set rules such as 3-A Assembly, Standards of iGEM, rfc 10 protocol and everything about iGEM.
iGEM Team IIT Delhi sent its representatives to the Indian iGEM meetup which was held at IISER Pune and was attended by 9 iGEM teams from India and iGEM Peshawar, Pakistan was on Skype conference. The purpose for this was to discuss projects and strategies among the teams and help each other with problems that were being faced. The possibility of collaboration was also discussed among other topics.
We met the IISER Mohali team again at the All India iGEM Meetup held at IISER Pune and discussed with them the progress in their project and other goals based on their progress.
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We also helped them out with the procedures involved in Registration, shipment of parts, Visa, shared with them our Jamboree Presentation experience and also talked about the apt number of students who come to MIT.
