A two day workshop, EDGE- research Experience Driven Growth to Energize the career of students was conducted at Dr A.P.J Abdul Kalam Centre of Excellence during 04.01.2018-05.01.2018. The workshop aimed at strengthening the research career of the final year students of B. Tech Biotechnology. The program started off with a introduction and action plan by Dr. Rama Vaidyanathan. The students were taught to be focussed on their research area of interest. They were also provided with a entrepreneurship style quiz and were allowed to assess themselves on their capabilities to make, manage and implement a work plan into a successful project. At the end of the quiz, each of them were evaluated and related to a personality depending on the scores they gained.

     The session continued with a lecture by Dr. J. Arun on INDIA as an innovation hub. He highlighted various government and private funding agencies that supports novel ideas from the growing researchers and motivated the students to enrollthemselvelves in these grants. In addition, he also presented few innovations that has revolutionized INDIA and won many accolades to the science field. The lecture was mainly stressed on how to convert the knowledge into a translational research.

     On the same day (04.01.2018)afternoon session students were asked to involve in an activity to check the team work and determine their own personality. The students were divided into four teams with resource person helping them and was asked to build a tower out of waste paper within a fifteen minute time period. The team that had the strongest and tallest tower was considered the winner. This session was handled by Dr. Rama Vaidyanathan. After the activity, each team explained how they strategized, planned and worked as a team to build the tower. In this session the students identified their own character or qualities when in a team.

     The workshop also had a lecture series from Dr. Reena Das on tool for thinking wherein, she had explained how to analyse an issue based on different thinking hats. Starting from the curation of the datas of the problem to bringing out a solution. She also insisted on knowing the demerits and the difficulties faced when we have several ideas to solve the issue. Additionally she also made the teams to solve an issue with the thinking hat method. The last event of the first day was a test to evaluate the subjective knowledge of students. They were given few questions compiled of arithematic, verbal and reasoning and science.

The second day was initiated with discussion on the questionnaire they took on the previous day. Resource persons Mr. A. Vasantha Raja and Ms. Prithika U solved and detailed the answers in the morning session which was followed by the laboratory visit and explanation on the use of instruments by Dr. H. Magesh.

     In the post lunch session Mr. A. Vasantha Raja demonstrated the students about the lab activities and practices. The students were also given a chance to do simple experiments such as autoclaving, preparing a broth/ agar how to grow a culture. At the event winded up with recognizing the interest of each student on their preferred area to do their final year projects.

-Dr. Prithika U