Day 5 - Aftermath, spending money and the parting of ways

D-day was over, our baggage was a few kilos (YES KILOS, NOT POUNDS, WE'RE FROM EUROPE) heavier, but we still had one more day in Boston we could spend together. And how to better spend it than buying stuff! We were of course quite tired from celebrating the grand prize, but over the summer we learned that sleep is for the weak, so we kept on going. We bought all sorts of stuff from MIT, Harvard, some random souvenirs and some food of course. We got to see a little bit of Boston and got a feeling it's a historic, quiet but a very nice city. Maybe not as lively as other bigger cities are (NY, SF, …), but great nonetheless. After a whole day of walking around and spending money we headed back to the hotel, where we met with our instructors for a final drink together. It was kind of sad after spending so much time together over the summer and having to somehow end this long journey we took. We knew that we'll see each other again after we all get back to Slovenia, but still! So we said our goodbyes to our instructors. The student part of the team went different ways as well, computer scientist to California, San Francisco and Silicon Valley of course, while life scientist decided to go to Puerto Rico. We said goodbyes to each other and ..

.. so we finished our Jamboree, thus the parting of ways began.

Day 4 - 'And the iGEM 2010 Grand prize goes to…'

I'm not telling you yet! So, we get up, temperature quite normal, other than morning hunger, everything seems to be in place. We feel a little bit of tingling, but nothing too stressful. Me and Jernej decide to go through the presentation again, in case shit happens and we get to the finals. After morning 'prayers' we start our way towards the Kresge Auditorium where they served breakfast (8:30). At 10.00, the start of final ceremony. They open with some random addressing, some random talk and the closer we are to the actual finalists announcement, the higher the temperature is, the more intense the tingling gets. Finally, the ceremony reaches the finalist list.

180bpm when the list starts … and the first finalist is Slovenia!!!! WOOOOOHOOOOOOOOO HAPPY TIMES! Flooded by happiness we see the rest of the list we're surprised at the final Finalist list (BCCS-Bristol, Cambridge, Imperial College London, Peking, TUDelft).

Yeey!!

We actually expected some other teams, like Freiburg_Bioware or Heidelberg. Nonetheless, what mattered most to us was, selfishly, that we were on it. 

Because we were the first on the list, we got to give our Final presentation first. Together with Jernej we got ready to rumble, with the rest of the team supporting us from the background. 

Our team getting up on the stage for the final presentation

Now standing in front of over 1000 people, made me feel both great and scared. 

The crowd at Kresge

While the nervousness is the feeling you'd first think of, joy takes over and talking goes smooth. If there was ever a perfect presentation of our project it was this one. No mess ups, perfect transitions, perfect timing, excellent feeling. The smile on our faces once we were greeted with the applause from the spectacular crowd could probably be seen all the way from Slovenia. The feeling sensational. At that moment, I doubted the feeling will ever be matched.

Jernej impressing the crowd

Jure doing his magic

Judges interested in our project

the crowd applauding us after the presentation

After we went off the stage, a huge burden was lifted. All we needed to do now was wait for the judges to decide which project was the best. Before they moved to their 'private' chambers to decide, all the other presentations had to happen. After seeing them, the team that seemed most threatening was Peking. 

Peking

TU Delft

TU Delft presenting, everyone knew who would win best presentation

BCCS Bristol

Imperial College London

Their presentation was solid as well as their idea. But what we felt was that all the teams, while having awesome ideas and great presentations, lacked actual results. We had them.

Our team applauding one of the other finalists

After 2 tedious hours (tedious because of the wait, not because of the quality of presentations - they were all very good), judges finally went to their secret place, where they plot the end of the world. Or the winner of all the iGEM prizes. Before we could go out for free time, we had to do the 'iGEM from above picture'. We were told that it's rainy outside, so we won't be doing it outside, but in the Auditorium. After some logistics adjustment picture was taken and we were free to roam about for 20 minutes or so.
 

iGEM 2010 from above picture 

This is where the tingling started to get bothering. We had a break, food and drinks before the judges came back and to be perfectly honest with you I (and most of the other team members) didn't need those. What we did is stand outside and waited. We again got thumbs up from a lot of other teams, 'The Sven judge' swung by earlier and asked another question and was happy with the answer. We saw that Heidelberg team was really sad they didn't get to finals, and rightfully so. We all thought their project was quite amazing and one of the prime candidates for the grand prize. They were really nice though and wished us good luck, hoping we would win. And at that point it was clear that while prizes and awards are both awesome and amazing, it's the friendships and connections you make on iGEM that really matter. Having all those teams congratulate us meant so much and as I said on the presentation, I believe this event won't be forgotten after it'll end, just because of the amount of work everyone put in it.

And before you know it, the crowd started moving inside again. This time tingling was quite annoying, nervousness almost reaching its peak. We slowly moved in and shortly found out that judges still aren't back. Randy talked us through some stuff and we watched some of the fun videos from other teams, they made in their free time (free time during iGEM, what's that? =P). Some of them were really amusing and they served their purpose, made us busy not to think about when the judges are coming back. After a few minutes, judges finally started to stream inside and the crowd went wild. They all came to the stage and after some time and again some logistic problems the announcements were about to start. As Tom (the judge with the laptop etc) plugged in his Macbook a blooper happened. His presentation was not minimized and we could see '1st Runner up Peking'. Again, the crowd went wild. The blooper was quite bad, but seeing the first runner up, we knew we still had shot for the Grand prize.

The judges (well except Roman)

But grand prize was to be awarded at the end of the ceremony. First, the other awards had to be given. Track awards first (we were competing for Best New Application): Best food or Energy Project: BCCS-Bristol; Best Environment Project: Peking; Best Health or Medicine Project: Washington & Freiburg Bioware (Tie); Best Information Processing Project: ETHZ Basel & Tokyo Tech (Tie); Best Manufacturing Project: MIT; Best New Application Area: wait for it … SLOVENIA! WOOOHOOO!; Best Foundation Advance: Paris Liliane Battencourt; Best Software Tool: USTC Software. I won't go through all the Special Prizes Winners, you can find them here: http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page I'm just going to say we won Best New BioBrick Part or Device, Engineered and we also got the iGEMers Prize together with Cambridge, Imperial, MIT and EPF Lausanne. This was the prize for the best team by other iGEMers. Thanks everyone, we love you!

A few pictures of our celebrations for all the award we won!

And then, the announcement. Of course, before we actually got to the announcement there was a long talk about something I don't remember because I was too nervous. The time was around 14:30 and the temperature was higher than midsummer in Death Valley. It was absolutely insane, nervousness was killing us and the tingling I was talking before was gone. We were sweaty and edgy. First, the second runner up: BCCS-Bristol. Heat wave. As we knew that First runner up was Peking, that gave us a good chance of actually winning the whole thing. But we didn't want to dream. We wanted to see our name on the presentation before we actually celebrated. Then, quite anti-climactic, first runner up: Peking. And then … after 5 months of hard work, after 5 months of staying up long and waking up early, 5 months of no social life outside the lab and computer: "And the iGEM 2010 Grand prize goes to: SLOVENIA".

*screaming, hugging, jumping, happy, almost tears, more hugging and jumping, more screaming, more of happy*

The feeling phenomenal, emotions unmatched and all the work paid for. The grand prize was ours and no one could take that feeling from us.

Only enjoying and smiles came next. We had 2 interviews straight after, all the teams coming to congratulate us and above everything, the real Brick in our hands. We took some great pictures with it, had loads of fun. After the photo session and the initial shock of actually winning (the shock was not close to over, but the initial euphoria was replaced by blissful happiness), we realized that we were actually REALLY hungry, as we haven't had anything to eat since morning (it was around 16:00). Our head mentor Roman made a reservation at Legal Sea food so we headed there and had a great dinner with some wine.

Everyone loving the brick :)

PR photo

Mentors with THE BRICK

Students with THE BRICK

Student with Meagan <3<3<3 and the brick

Group picture in front of the MIT

After returning to the hotel, we got instructions to get something to drink. We got some beer, wine and champagne. We had some problems getting other teams to go and party with us, but everything got sorted in the end. We started to celebrate with our magnificent and amazing (!!) mentors and after a while dispersed to other party points. I could say so much more about this day and the night that followed, but I'll just stop here and say that the night was wild, that each of us got his own share of enjoyment and I'll say (just as anyone else would for theirs) that mine was the best!

Day 3 - The Poster session and 'we shouldn't expect too much'

So, the first after-party day was here and considering jet lag, hangover and early waking up for breakfast, we were OKish. The girl part of our team somehow didn't know where and when we meet, so sadly, we had to start without them. We got to a bus, that took us to the breakfast place and after another American breakfast - 8:30 - (bagels, muffins, fruit, eggs (?) and of course terrible coffee by European standards), we again made a plan about visiting other presentations.

bullshit, he doesnt really want that :))

breakfast table

Harvard was up and some other prominent names, so it was quite interesting, however we still felt we did an amazing job compared to most. We also hung up our poster and every free minute we had, we tried to stand next to it and explain our project to any curious souls passing by. Most were excited, some of them invited us to their poster session and all in all we had a great time meeting new people and having to share our ideas and achievements with others. It was what Jamboree was made for, networking. Fun times.

Slowly getting through all the presentations, we started to get hungry and a bit tired, so we were happy when lunch time came. It wasn't much of a lunch, more like a pumped up sandwich, but hey, it was "free" (if we don't count the $400 entry fee for each member and 4 digit number for the team). After getting some energy back with food and drinks, we decided it would be best to continue visiting other presentations and see how others were doing and try to find tricky questions. A few teams presented some great projects and we started to wonder if it was healthy to be so sure we'll be in the finals. We didn't want to get disappointed, but we all quietly hoped we'll get there.

@ harvad presentation

We managed to check out most of the presentations we wanted and after the final one (what up Minnesota!), we wanted to get ready for the official poster presentation time which started at 19:30.

We brought out our leaflets and fired up our laptops for animations we made in Maya and our human practice short video in plain english. Let the "Hi can I take you through our project?" begin! It's funny how at the start of the summer, I (as a computer scientist) had no idea, how exactly are we going to integrate to the team of life sciences students and at the Jamboree, I knew enough about our project to confidently take anyone through the project. Only when someone asked me how we did this and that experiment into details, I had to poke one of the other students to help me out. It was a nice feeling, seeing I learned so much over the summer. Right before the end of the poster session, we even tried our human practice board game "DNA Explorer". We quickly realized that it's not a drinking game, so we finished early.

our poster + dna explorer

messages for our team from other iGEMrs

preparation for the poster session after lunch

preparing to diplay the leaflets/dna explorers

gangsta?

Tina I. @ the poster session

the beginnings of bonding with team mexico

Nejc explainig our project to a student of Johns Hopkins University

After a few 10s of people passed and a few judges left with happy faces, our spirits were high again. We even managed to explain some complicated answers we had on our presentations. 'The Sven judge' asked a lot and it was obvious he's interested in how and why we did stuff, but at the end, he was satisfied and we were all happy! Fun times.

Although our spirits were very high, our mentors and instructors warned us not to feel to confident as the disappointment when expectations are not met can be devastating. So, in our heads we said that we're already winners, just because of the high interest in our project from other students and all the great feedback we got. The feeling actually was both awesome and amazing. With our emotions high and all the general happiness around us, we started to get ready for the party at Jillian's right next to the Red Sox stadium.

Me and Jernej decided it would be smart to go through the presentation one more time, in case we manage to get to finals. We added some stuff to the presentation went through it once, while drinking some Heineken. We realized that we know stuff and that some of the phrases were heard so many times, they were beginning to be funny ('What we see here…', 'It's both awesome and amazing', etc.). Even other team members memorized them and were making fun of us. We even turned them to pick up lines! They're both awesome and amazing (see what I did there?).

So, Jillian's! We drove there in old yellow school buses made of win.

failed attempt of a school bus photo #1

failed attempt of a school bus photo #2

They were creaky and smelled terrible, but still great. Once we arrived there, we got stamped and headed inside. There was food, there was drinks and we even got some coupons for soft drinks. Surprisingly, both beer and liquors were quite cheap. While convincing ourselves that we shouldn't drink because of the possibility of another presentation next day, we drank "a bit". Even our instructors and mentors were having fun!

No comments needed for the following pics.

We bonded with some more students while the night kept on going towards morning. Finally, the party came to an end and we again had a bus organized back to our hotels. The thing you have to love about MIT and Jamboree was its organization. Any time we had an organized event there was a bus to that building, there was always food and drinks around and help on every turn. For our presentation we managed to sort out lighting, sound and projector. It indeed was cool and very nice.

After arriving to Hyatt, we went straight to bed, for finals were up next day and we had quiet expectations that our name will come up on the finalist list.

Day 2 - The presentation day

We got up quite early (7:00), because of both jet lag and being nervous how the presentation will go. We didn't have any breakfast in the hotel.

With our presentation just a few hours away, we first went to the opening ceremony and iGEM breakfast, where one of the HQ guys (Randy) gave us a nice speech and we got to meet the first few people from other teams.

Typical american breakfast, random stuff + sugar

Team Slovenia before the opening

Kresge Auditorium

Randy opening the iGEM jamboree

Immediately, team Alberta and Wisconsin were labeled as the 'party' teams and rightly so. Everyone was really nice and friendly and we were soon sure that this event will be made of epic win and the result of the trip will be GREAT SUCCESS, even if we don't manage to take away any awards.

After the opening ceremony was over, other members dispersed to different presentations from other teams, while me and Jernej found a quiet place in the biggest hall possible and practiced for the presentation. We also got the chance to try out presentation on the stage, where we hoped to be again later in the week, presenting as finalists. We were feeling quite hyped and while nerves started to chew our concentration, we were both confident and sure we'll do just fine.

We met with the rest of the team for lunch at 11:30 and headed to our presentation room at 13:00, when finally the first presentation from our track started.

group photo after lunch at Walker (Texas Ranger:)) ) hall

Temperature was rising with every minute and when the time for our presentation came, Tomi gave us a few last minute words for morale boost.

pep talk

I slightly messed up my part, Jernej did great, apart from that everything went perfect. The presentation was over, questions were answered and as soon as judges announced we're out of time for official questions we were swarmed by both the members of other teams as well as judges who attended the presentation unofficially. We saw that the project was amazing, because of all the positive feedback we got just a few minutes after the first presentation.

Here are some pictures from the presentation:

Jernej and his game face #1

Jure gangsta stylin` it

Home crowd

Jernej with his game face on #2

first discussion of the judges on our project

those that werent presenting were as nervouse as Jernej and Jure

home crowd with 2 japanese guys still awake

and the 2 japanese guys asleep after the presentation :)) we think it was jet lag

anwsering questions

a lot of people were interested in our project, some were more interested in Monika and Jerneja :))

We left the presentation building at around 16.00, when we finally managed to answer all the questions people were throwing at us. The spirit of the entire team was high, feeling was great.

We visited some presentations from other teams and found out that most of the projects are very interesting and ideas great, but very few had as astounding results as we did (*cough* Cambridge *cough* - the presentation was really nice though).

crowd at the first poster session

After the presentations, the first poster session began (17:30 - session where teams present their posters in one room). Walking from poster to poster enabled us to meet all the other students and ask them about their work and their accomplishments.

It's amazing how a simple event like explaining poster to an unknown person can result in having friends from all over the world. After the poster session (19:00) we attended FBI workshop concerning biosecurity, where they told us what steps they're taking when it comes to novel biological applications which could potentially be used to harm others. Had a few laughs, when a typical Pakistani student was asking about getting a job at the FBI (they were inviting people to apply for one of course). It was fine, not amazing though. We headed back to our hotel at around 20:30.

So after a nice day like that, party is the next step. First we drank a few beers with our instructors, celebrating great response from all the other teams. After a while, me and Jernej decided we had to find some Danish girls we met at the poster session (and they had a cool Computer Science oriented project btw!). While walking up and down in the hotel we met the guys from Alberta, and shockingly they invited us to a party in one of their rooms. The word got out and after an hour or so, we got our first warning to leave the room because we were too loud. Alcohol had nothing to do with that, I swear. We met some awesome people on that party (Sarah, Yue, Nathaniel, Alin … basically Wisconsin and Alberta people) with which we hung out for the rest of the jamboree. We also met a mexican team, that were fun (and of course the girls pretty) and some German/Swiss people.

party time #1

happy face :)

fun times

After we switched 3 rooms and were told the MIT police will come if we don't calm down, we decided it would be best to go to the near parking-lot garage, where we wouldn't be bothering anyone. We got there and after a while the party died out, people got tired and slowly, one by one we went to bed. It was a free day tomorrow. Except later in that day we had to get ready for our poster session. But the rest of it was free. If I don't count all the presentation we wanted to see and the number of practice runs for possible final presentation. But yea, it was mostly free. Beeedd…