How iGEM Changed My Career
by Dimitrios Michailidis, iGEM Alumnus (2014-2020)
Dimitrios also gave a session on this topic at iGEM’s 2020 Global Meet-up (iGEM Video Universe)
iGEM may look like just a biology experience, but it can really have an impact on one’s career. I’d like to share with you how iGEM has changed my career from being a hardcore biology researcher to wanting to go into product management.
Part I - The Realisation
I was a biology researcher at the University of Dundee, UK. I was working 10:00-19:00, including weekends, all I read about was microbial infections, and I was having so much fun. So, it was all sunshine and rainbows, and then I took an arrow in the knee… I mean, iGEM came along.
I did iGEM as a student and for the first time my work had a user. We had a concrete problem we were trying to solve; we had to think about a platform for our user to interact with our biology. I was working on a team of engineers, programmers, designers. iGEM forces you to take a wholesome approach to solve a problem, and that's just a perfect taste of the real life.
This made me feel like Neo in ‘The Matrix’ who was presented with two options – Take the blue pill: Forget all about iGEM and go back to studying for the University; or Take the red pill: Stay in iGEM wonderland and iGEM shows me how deep the rabbit hole goes. So, obviously, I chose the red pill.
As the University could not give me the knowledge I wanted, I had to find someone or something that could: the internet. Thanks to the internet, we now have access to the work of the best people in the world: YouTube videos, books, podcasts. Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, Ray Dalio, and Robert Kiyosaki are a few examples of these people for the areas I was interested in: business & performance. I switched from reading PubMed articles about biology to reading and listening to the people who are the best in the world in performance and business.
Part II - The Action
I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to do in life. The PhD was the logical next step for the career path I was on, and it also gave me money to start my own life. I knew however, that I wanted to keep doing iGEM. When I started my PhD, the only way for me to do iGEM was to create the Sheffield iGEM team myself. So, I did.
Running Sheffield iGEM as an organization taught me 3 main things: user research, business, and communicating with different teams.
User Research
My user research for our 2019 iGEM project, OPENLUX, allowed us to turn our device from a research tool into a learning kit. This made for a much more impressive project which eventually won us Best Hardware Project.
Business
Having to create Sheffield iGEM from scratch was like creating a startup, which I had no idea how to do. Thankfully, the internet did. Running Sheffield iGEM for the last four years, showed me a few things. As the President, I had to think about the structure and vision for Sheffield iGEM. For Finance and HR, I fundraised and managed almost £100,000, and designed the recruitment for and managed 30 students. For Production, one of my favourite parts, I had to think about project management (how to lead a team through the project cycle from Spring to November).
Communication
An iGEM team is actually composed of many different sub-teams, and they all speak their very own language. Engineers, for example, talk about AutoCAD and Fusion360 to make the hardware. Biologists want plasmids, growth media, and restriction enzymes for their experiments. The web developer used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make the wiki. For our potential users, I had to speak very precisely and simply because I could be talking to many different audiences, from University researchers to hospital patients. Leaving the best for last, I had to learn to communicate with University Departments (e.g. How can we have our own account for our budget? How do we open one?).
Part III - The Future
After four years running Sheffield iGEM, the biggest question in my mind was: How can I do what I’ve been doing for iGEM in the real world? One day, I shared this question with my friend Carlos, and he said, “You’re already doing a lot of research on the internet, why not make a list of all the jobs people you listen to have or mention?”. In that very same week, I listened to Tim Ferriss’ podcast episode with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, where he described something that is almost exactly the same as what I have been doing for iGEM: Product Management.
Suffice to say, I looked up product management on the internet and binged on everything I could find; YouTube talks, books, interviews. My personal favourites are the “Cracking the PM Interview” book by Gayle McDowell, and Miles Lennon’s talk at Product School San Francisco.
With the help of these two, I was able to redo my entire CV and spin my experience based on my iGEM product management experience. Following their ideas, I was able to get an interview with a software company and start negotiations with them to start pivoting from biology and into product management. I do not know what will come of these discussions, but this is where I currently find myself in my career post-iGEM.
Conclusion
iGEM has been a game changer for me, and I know it can be for others too. iGEM is what we make it to be. With this article and talk, I wanted to give everybody a glimpse of what is possible through iGEM.
The views expressed by the author are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion and policy of that of the iGEM Foundation.
