Student blogs

Wondering what it’s like studying the bachelor’s in biomedicine at KI? Perfect, in this blog I’ll be giving you an overview of how the program is structured with an insight into what our 3rd course, “Stem Cell and Developmental Biology” was like. 

How our studies are structured (1st year)

But before we get into course specific content I think it’s important to clarify how the bachelors as a whole is structured. In the first year, we cover 3 courses in each semester.

In the first semester we had:

• Introduction to Biomedical Sciences
• Organic Chemistry
• Stem Cell and Developmental Biology

In the second semester we’re covering:

• Biochemistry
• Genetics, genomics and functional genomics
• Chemical biology (yes, it’s different to biochemistry)

We take one course at a time

What I think makes KI a bit unique is that instead of studying all of these different courses at the same time, we study one at a time. This means we have lectures only on a specific course over several weeks, and then an exam on it. So we don’t have exam periods with multiple exams covering the content of several courses. Also, since every course is organized by different professors oftentimes the course structure varies a lot. To explain my point, I’ll give you an insight into what it was like studying Stem cell and Developmental Biology!

Insight into a course: stem cell and developmental biology

Starting the course with a warm welcome

We started the course with a usual introductory lecture where the professor presents the general structure of the course (eg. course content, lab work, projects, etc.) This intro lecture, our professor even kindly surprised us with some sweets that we got to enjoy during the break. Definitely much appreciated during a morning lecture.

Course lectures

Lectures vary a lot because they’re often given by a bunch of different professors, who are all researchers at KI. So they often differ in how they are structured, delivered, their content, etc. What’s pretty nice is that all professors are very approachable and always willing to answer questions either while they’re presenting or after.

Another cool thing about this course was that we had a few interactive seminars where we discussed questions and content of previous lectures. I think attending things like this is a good way to keep you thinking about the content covered in the course. A nice form of revision.

We also had some seminars that were held just as additional information/additional research connected to the topic. This wasn’t going to be covered in the exam, so you could attend out of sheer curiosity to know a real life application of the theory, eg: What are the molecular mechanisms behind balding?

Lab work!

I’d say that this course was lab heavy, (not in a bad way) we got quite a lot of lab experience. Some of the coolest experiments were learning to label different organelles with different fluorescent markers and then observing these cells under fluorescent microscopes (see images above.) Another really interesting practical was treating neural progenitor cells with different growth factors in order to steer them to a certain specialization pathway, e.g. to develop into neurons. The results looked really cool!

We also had two mini-exams in the lab which were to test our skills of pipetting and microscopy. What was quite nice for all this lab work was also the fact that we only had to write one lab report on the last practical we did on cell migration and proliferation.

Group work- Critical thinking

As a bit of a break from lab work and lectures, this course included some work that taught us how to read, analyze and search for research papers. We had a few seminars, projects and assignments related to this, including a group presentation. We also had a “flash talk” where we were all assigned a disease and had 45 minutes to prepare a “pitch” for funding the studies of the disease.

Finishing the course with some arts and crafts: the exhibition

This was a very unique fun project we got to work on after the exam. It felt like being back in middle school working on a science fair poster, getting to use our creativity and artistic skills and have a bit of fun. Our class was divided into groups, and each group was assigned a disease that we had to research and create a presentation on. Ours was FoxG1 syndrome. We had one day to create the poster, and the next day we presented our posters to a group of Swedish high school students. 

Overall, it was quite a fun and unique course, and I enjoyed the variety of different things it covered. The exam also went well…despite it being after winter break!