Student blogs

Warm greetings!

Hej, alihoppa! It’s me again, Ayu. As you all know, I’m studying Health Informatics at KI, and I’m now in my second year. I want to give you a closer look at what I’ve been up to lately and how I’m navigating my courses.

It’s now the beginning of November. In my last blog post, I wrote about preparing for winter, and I’m gradually doing all of those things now (you can check my previous blog post here). And yup, the saffransbulle is finally here! Hihi, I’m so happy to meet this bread again. Let me show you a picture I took on a random walk, which captures the warmth of autumn (soon to fade and be replaced by snow and mostly white vibes).

Can anyone guess where it is?

SciLifeLab 2026 Symposium: Living systems across scales

Autumn isn’t the only thing keeping me inspired these days. Recently, I also attended a seminar that opened a new perspective for me as a student. The 2026 theme, Living systems across scales, focuses on integrating insights from molecular and cellular biology to tissues, organs, and whole organisms. Particular emphasis will be placed on emerging technologies and approaches, including spatial omics, advanced imaging, and data-driven methods for linking phenotype to function.

I learned about this seminar from one of my lecturers who teaches the Current Research and Trends course in semester 3 (you can check the course details here). The seminar isn’t actually part of the curriculum, but it became a new window for us students to see what researchers are doing today. This event focused in particular on RIKEN Japan and Sweden, whose collaboration has apparently lasted for 21 years.

It was an exciting seminar for me. It’s been a long time since I did any wet lab work, going back to my undergrad thesis (I did an in vivo experiment on periodontitis healing in rats). Now I’m here doing my master’s, which mostly doesn’t involve labs anymore, but the seminar brought back memories of my lab days. Now I think that with advances in technology, many things can be developed. Things that were previously unimaginable are slowly being explored to advance knowledge. That’s why I always think that in learning, nothing is ever wasted. With the various dots you learn, you may later connect and apply them in future research development.

Starting a new course

In the third semester, we’re taking two courses in parallel at KI and SU, and right now I’m mostly studying in SU classes. We have the right to choose between 4 courses available to us from SU (I will cover this later and interview my friends from different elective courses, so stay tuned!). Right now, I’m studying Reinforcement Learning. Why? Because it has been my dream to study something related to math since I was a kid, and it still feels like a dream! Honestly, the course is a bit difficult and requires a lot of study. I don’t know if I can survive it or not, but I’ll try my best! It’s also fun to study from a math-technical perspective, hihi!