iGEM Made Me Realize What I Wanted to Do
Meet Varsha, the iGEM ambassador for Asia. For her, the whole experience of the Jamboree at iGEM 2019 was so exciting and enjoyable that she just knew she’d have to come back as an ambassador for the 2020 edition of the competition.
She fondly recounts memories from the Jamboree — from breaking into an impromptu jig with the new friends she’d made in the middle of the poster session to the after iGEM party to staying up for two days in a row working furiously before the wiki freeze. Being her first international experience, the Jamboree was an exhilarating experience-meeting people from more countries than she could name.
“I was the only girl on my team.”
When asked if there was one thing she wanted to change about her experience as part of a team in iGEM 2019, Varsha was quick to answer — “I’d want there to be more girls!” One thing Varsha believes strongly in is having diversity on a team. As fun as the competition is, there are unique challenges faced by being the only girl on a team and she feels that the whole experience would be so much more interesting and enriching with more diversity.
“Doing so much lab work, I realized that that’s not what I wanted to do.”
Varsha is one of those lucky enough to have figured out what she wants to do in life. How did she figure this out? “One of the best things about participating in iGEM is that I learned that I didn’t want to do pure science. I want to do more translational research instead. iGEM introduced me to those fronts.”
When asked where she sees the competition going, she says the goals of iGEM are undergoing a shift to focus on sustainability. It is also rapidly expanding to so many regions. There is also work on making the competition more online and hence accessible to teams with smaller budgets.
As for advice for future teams, she says that iGEM isn’t just about dry lab and getting experiments done. “It is a really amazing opportunity. So talk to as many people as possible and attend as many of the events as possible.” She believes that there is so much learning that comes from being part of a team in a competition like this one. From learning to work together and cooperate, to building a team from scratch and managing this team so that everyone is happy, it is challenging but also fun! Even being an ambassador is a huge learning experience, she says.
Her mantra is to always stay positive! We may be in the midst of extraordinary circumstances, but this doesn’t dampen her ever-present smile and electric personality.
