Andrew Houk

Taller than Ben
I was an iGEM buddy during the summer of 2009 after completing my fourth year of graduate school. I decided to become a buddy because the iGEM project was in my field, chemotaxis, so my knowledge and experience could be valuable to iGEM. I had heard that iGEM students are very talented and motivated, and I love teaching so it was a pretty easy decision for me. During the first week, I gave a lecture about small G-proteins and then had the students work problems as homework. I designed the problems myself and intended them to be quite difficult. I showed them to other people in my lab, who thought the problems would be impossible for these recent high school graduates to solve. The answers I got to the problems were extremely impressive. Not only did they understand my lecture, they were able to combine knowledge from different areas to generate extremely creative solutions. That was probably the most rewarding experience for me.