Zukunftstag
Career orientation at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg
Current: Career orientation during Zukunftstag Day at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics (MPI-IE) as part of the nationwide Girls' Day initiative. Regulary, the doors of the MPI-IE will be open to interested girls to discover the exciting world of molecular biology and the professional field of a researcher.
The Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics regularly participates in the nationwide “Girls’ & Boys’ Day” initiative with a so-called Zukunftstag. On this day, schoolchildren from Freiburg and the surrounding area will be given an insight into the institute’s research topics and will be able to visit laboratories.
Research live
The key topics of the institute are Immunobiology and Epigenetics. To learn more about them and to understand how we research them, we put together a new and exciting program every year. In addition to smaller lectures about the institute and the work of a researcher in various areas of modern biology (DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, cell culture), the program includes laboratory visits (fly facility, microscopy). Knowledge already gained in school lessons, such as protein biosynthesis, the structure of the DNA, is playfully linked to the institute’s concrete research questions.But of course, students in grades 8 to 11 can also experiment on their own.
Experimenting yourself
In the in-house school laboratory, the students also practice experimenting themselves. Together with our researchers, plasmids are prepared, DNA is extracted from all kinds of fruit and vegetables, or even an electrophoresis is carried out. The aim: to get girls in particular interested in MINT professions and show them that working in basic biological research is fun and also offers exciting career prospects for women.
