Student blogs

This semester I started my degree project to finish up my master’s programme in Molecular Techniques in Life Science. That is why, I want to give you a glimpse of what my day looks like which full of doing experiments, reading research articles and exciting discussions about science.

For the master’s degree projects, we are given the freedom to do it in academia or industry and the project can be done abroad or in Sweden. I chose to do the project in a lab in Science for Life Laboratories (SciLifeLab) which is located next to the KI campus in Stockholm. It has been a bit more than a month since my project started up and running, and now I have a good schedule for my experiments, data analysis and also keeping up with literature at the same time. So, let’s start to look at how my day goes.

7.30 am – Starting the day

Even though the days are getting longer here in Stockholm, we still miss the sunlight as this week has been pretty cloudy. However, I usually get up around this time to have a good breakfast and get ready for the day.

8.30 am – Experiments, experiments, experiments

Since this day will be very busy with the experiments, I decided to come a bit early to the lab (usually I come around 9 am). My project involves a lot of microscopy work to understand a disease mechanism, and I work with cell lines. I already prepared the cells a few days ago, so today I will mostly do imaging of them. So, I set up everything for the experiment in which I had to stain my cells and start imaging.

12.00 pm – Lunch & coffee break

Most people in Sweden cook at home and bring their lunch with them. As a second-year student, and trying to be budget-friendly, I accustomed myself to this lunch culture, so I usually cook at home and bring my lunch with me. After lunch, we also have a lab tradition of enjoying a cup of coffee together as well, so coffee is a must!

4.00 pm – Let’s read some literature

As I work with a disease model, there has been quite a lot of literature that came up over the past years studying the disease mechanism. That is why, I read daily to understand what has been done before and get new ideas about how we can understand the data that I am producing now. After this, my brain was pretty tired and I finished up my day around 5.30 pm as I went to a small concert with my friends from the lab.

So, this was a pretty normal day for me as a master’s thesis student, full of experiments and reading which I enjoy a lot. Last year, I also wrote a blog about my life when I was doing the coursework, if you want to learn how the first year of my studies went you can check it out here.

If you have any questions about degree projects in master’s studies, feel free to send me an e-mail!

See you in the next blog!