@Randy: If you eliminate the fee at the championship by increasing the regional fee, I think you could get around the problem of "what if more people go to the championship" by charging students who didn't go to the regional but go to the championship a registration fee. Basically, students have to pay a registration fee, so if you send a smaller group to the regional and pay for them, then you will have to pay for any additional students who attend the championship if their team advances. Thoughts?
I'm curious when the information regarding the NA-East regional will be posted. The Asia, Latin America, and Europe pages are all up (and have been for a while...). Like many other teams, the BU team is on a rather tight budget and I would like to book things sooner rather than later, so information on a draft schedule (so we know what time we can fly out of Pittsburgh on Oct 14th) would be really helpful. Likewise, information on hotel costs is important so we can budget out the cost of the Jamborees from our iGEM funds.
A question for everyone. We could eliminate the registration fee for the championship by increasing the regional attendance fees by about 1/3.
Would that be a good idea?
What would we do if a team sent only 6 students to the regional and then sent 12 to the Championship?
Dear Kristian,
The numbers you computed were for teams that advanced to the world championship. Only about 1/3 of the teams advance, so you need
two rows of summary costs. If the team advances, and if the team does not advance. The Jamboree attendance fees for students and others stayed the
same in 2012 and 2011. The team registration fee increased $250, so the total cost for a team that did not advance was only $250 more.
The big difference is in the extra costs for teams that advance. In 2011, the registration fee for the championship in your scenario was $2650.
Note that this is $265 per person, significantly less than hotel and air fare.
We had to raise the fees in 2012 because we lost too much money on the Championship Jamboree last year.
Hi everyone,
I writing on behalf of the 2012 Rutgers University iGEM team. We are excited to compete in this year's Regional Jamboree. Does anyone know where the 2012 East Regional Jamboree will be held this year? Our sponsors are very inquisitive and need to know the details of this event.
Thanks,
Anish Vaghela | anish.vaghela@gmail.com
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
School of Engineering
Biomedical Engineering, B.S. 2013
Hello,
I just wanted to post a note of caution regarding financing. Teams should be aware of the rising costs. Here are data from the last years and the final fees for a typical team given in US$:
iGEM fees
year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
team registration 1000 1250 1750 2000 2200
jamboree undergraduate 100 175 225 225 275
jamboree graduate 250 375 425 425 475
8 students+Ph.D.+PI
2 jamborees from 2011 2300 3400 4400 7300 8500
Dear Randy.
I was not aware of this system. If I understood it right, if region A has twice more teams than region B, then twice more teams from A will pass to the world jamboree at the MIT, right? If this is the case, then it is true that, a priori, each team has the same chances of advancing to the championship. But it is also true that this system will result in good projects being rejected in very competitive regions, whereas weaker projects will have more chances to pass in less competitive regions. Anyhow, if the objective is to have represented as much regions as possible in the final jamboree, this is indeed a good strategy.
Let me answer Manuel. We are trying to be fair.
First, advancement to the world championship is a fixed percentage of the teams participating in the regional jamboree - not the same
number of teams in each region. The percentage is approximately 60 divided by the total number of teams. Each team has the same probability of
advancing to the championship.
Second, we are starting a South/Latin America regional as an experiment in an exciting but geographically remote region. We are expecting
perhaps 10 to 15 teams this year.
Third, in 2011, the Americas region had 64 teams while Europe and Asia had fewer than 50 teams. If we have 25% growth, the Americas would have
too many teams. It needs to be split before Europe or Asia.
For 2013, we will probably have to split Asia into a northern and a southern region. We don't know about Europe.
Three jamborees in America and only one in Europe? I think that two approaches are envisageable for the competition: (i) to follow a strict division in regional jamborees according to the number of teams attending the whole competition (in other words, every regional jamboree should have approximately the same number of teams); OR (ii) to organize jamborees on a strict geographic basis (to foster non-North American and Non-European teams). The number of regional jamborees has important consequences as the main selection step, and since I do not think that there are three times more teams in the Americas than in Europe, the 5-regions distribution does not look very fair.
