Team:Jiangnan China/Contribution-Journal

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Journal of the team-leader-journey

In May, 2020, when I was sitting at home reviewing stuff from online-courses, our professor called me. “Have you ever thought about holding the post of the team leader.”, said the professor quietly. I was kind of intimidated back then: how can I be a team leader without any experience? how can I lead the team properly with members so much more excellent than me?; how come the professor ask such an ordinary student to be the team leader?

The professor didn’t say anything else but “think about it when you are free.” I agreed with him irresolutely, but I made up my mind to try my best without sparing any effort. This was the beginning of my team-leader-journey.

NO.1 Paint a Blueprint

Being a leader is totally different from being a team member. It is always said that a good leader must have a big picture in his mind.

Following this idea, I went through the website again to know more about iGEM, which I was too lazy and unwilling to do before. I looked out all the deadlines that was published and found out all the details for every part.

There were still a lot of things that I couldn’t understand thoroughly, like what the difference between education and science communication is and how could we achieve partnership based on relatively incompact relationship of collaboration. It took me more than a week to comprehend function of each part which composes a whole project of iGEM.

I turned to previous team leaders from our university to ask how to set an opportune theme for our project during the time of COVID-19. I went for CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community) to ask those experts the detail of differences between rules for this year and the years before. I went to professors in and out of our school to inquire about the feasibility of our experiment.

Things became so much easier when people shed light on them from different points of view and putting opinions from others and yourself together. With thorough analysis, endless brainstorming and countless discussions, we decided to set the theme as “Hand in Hand”. We were going to share our hands with people from the past, through the present and on into the future, and with people from all walks of life. We also made our decision to use CRISPR/Cas9 to knock in promoters with different strength to fine-tune the ratio of Sorpholipid in Starmerella bombicola. With the help of modeling, choosing two or three promoters screened before to crucial regulating site of genes is a lot simpler than trying one by one and site by site. With trying again and again, more and more problems solved, I felt like I was lost in a jungle once upon a time, and just mapped routes out.

NO.2 Be Well-informed

Walking in a jungle, one of the most important things you need to do is to know roads around well. Only in this way, can you avoid swamps and pits while going out of the jungle safely. Being a leader, one of the most important qualities you have to possess is to be well-informed. Only in this way can you lead your team to the right directions without falling into swamps or pits alongside the journey.

Although we are unable to be perfectly informed, there are still chances for us to try our best and make it better.

As for iGEM, I think just putting an eye on official website is far from enough. We are also supposed to be social, paying attention to workshops and meetups as much as possible, meanwhile, helping others as well as we can. For us Chinese, the easiest way is to get in touch with CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community). In CCiC, we took part in countless workshops and meetups. From meetings like these, not only did we broaden our horizons, but also we made friends with groups from different countries and regions. Through meetups, we found a lot of our partners, like BUCT, Jilin_China, SZU-China and so on. Being friends with them brought numerous information for us. Usually, questions from other groups or discussion among us would shed light on our own problems.

NO.3 Unite a Team

There is nothing more important than uniting your team members. From my own point of view, the best leader doesn’t have to be the most excellent one but he will definitely attract experts from different areas and give them chances to exert themselves as well as they can.

At the same time, communication is of great importance in a team. During my leader-being time of iGEM, I felt I really did dedicate myself to my team and my project and, sometimes, I truly felt exhausted because of large amount of work. However, one day, one of my team members told me, “I don’t want to help you do experiment anymore. You seem like kind of idle. Please come to do some experiment.” The first moment I heard this, I felt heartbreaking and kind of angry. With so much burden on my shoulder and feeling tired every day, tears filled my eyes. When I went back and thought about her words, I realized what a huge a mistake I made. Because of the corona viruses, it is hard to come together to work through problems together. So we cannot see what each other did directly and we failed to communicate enough. In a team, only when we know each other enough can we trust each other; only when we trust each other can we collaborate successfully. So the first thing I did was talking with her and let her know my situation and told her not to do so much work herself. From that time on, I began to connect with my team members more frequently. I began to ask them if there were anything I could help with. I began to tell them about the difficulties I was facing. I began to make them in charge of something so they could know the situation of our project better.

NO.4 Make Space for Others

It is always said that leaders are expected to shoulder the most arduous work. However, in the meanwhile, I have to say that leaders are not expected to be in charge of everything. Only when you separate responsibility can you manage a group better. Because when you separate and allocate responsibility to others, you can spare yourself from trivial things and give yourself more time to look over a long distance, seeing something far and thinking something meaningful. And if any mistake happened, you could find the person in charge. But always, reflect on yourself first.