Student blogs

Hello everyone! Hope you are enjoying your summer in the best way that you can and that you are getting more and more excited for your start at KI this fall!

This blogpost intends to share how some of the Bioentrepreneurship students managed to get internships over the summer! The first year ended with our first practical placement (PP1) that lasted for 6 weeks. Some students continued working at those companies and others found things externally. Lets start!

Internships at H2 Health Hub

Pictures taken at H2 Health Hub. We are some of the KI students that got internships there!

H2 Health hub is an Innovation hub & co-working for digital health startups in Stockholm.

The place is huge with over 40 start ups currently members at the hub. They are part of a fast-growing community of high potential startups, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts, working in every sector of healthcare. It is just a stone’s throw away from KI Solna campus and we students managed to get internships in the different sectors.

How did we manage to get these internships?

The Business committee (BC) in our student union started an external collaboration with H2 where they dealt with the recruitment process. We sent in our CV and motivational letter, the BC executed the first round of selected applications, allocated them to the different start ups according to our interest and then we were interviewed.

Where am I performing my internship?

Me and my classmate Gerges are performing at a start up called Alteruna. The company develops softwares to train healthcare professionals in virtual reality. They are currently looking into a new market (cannot say more due to confidentiality) and we are performing a market analysis for them. We are quite used to doing market analysis through our masters and so the task itself is not that complicated! But the topic is new 🙂

2. Internships at practical placement companies

As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, we ended the first year with our first practical placement in the programme. Since everything had to be moved to distance learning, all our practical placements were virtual (through zoom) with the companies but it worked very well for all of us. Everyone kept good contact with their supervisors and really produced value for the companies.

Some companies offered students to continue on the project they were doing during PP1 or take responsibility for a new project over the summer which is great! It really shows how this set up of a programme (having practical placements) gives solid experience and value to the students!

3. Do we get paid?

This is an interesting question, especially when it comes to performing “internships” in Sweden. Generally, internships are not paid here. And this is very problematic. Less privileged individuals suffer from this (that need an income) while wealthy individuals foster from this as they can easily take the internships just to boost their CV. They are far ahead of you when you both graduate from the same programme.

In our group of students it is almost 50/50. Half are getting paid and half are not. It can depend on the budget of the company, how you negotiate your role and so on. But generally, I hope that this cycle ends at some point and that everyone involved can receive incentives and value from the work they put in. Students should not work for free!

// Tina 🙂