Student blogs

Hello and welcome!

Hope you all are enjoying the holiday season. It is time for the final and last course review blog post of the Biomedicine Bachelor programme. As you know, the next semester is going to be dedicated to the thesis project.

The last course we have going on in this programme is the Molecular Medicine one. The course started on 5th November 2018 and will go on until 18th January 2019, with the final exam on 17th January!

The 15 ECTS course is divided as follows:

Disease mechanisms, pathology, diagnosis and treatment, 3 ECTS

We had self-learning exercises based on lectures such as Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and bone metabolism, based on which we had 2 oral examinations in groups. It was mandatory to pass this section in order to pass the course! I feel like the self-learning in an examination context made me understand the topics in more detail. The oral exam itself was  only an hour long.

Research plan proposal, 3 ECTS

As the course lectures went by, towards the end we were introduced to the Research Application part of the course. A mock topic we would like to research on was presented as a written research application/proposal. This part of the course I feel is relevant to those who want to carry on with research in their Master’s programme. It was actually quite difficult to come up with a semi-novel topic. For example we had lipids in cardiovascular diseases as our area of focus and it was quite difficult to come up with a mock project as there is so much research going on in this particular field. However,just before Christmas the plan was submitted and now we wait until 8th January 2019 to present our research proposal in brief to the rest of the class!

Laboratory practicals and clinical demonstrations, 4 ECTS

This section consists of three parts:

Angiography demonstration: This was a lab where we had the opportunity to go observe an angiography taking place in the new Karolinska Hospital. It was a bit difficult to observe anything so I would say the organisation of this lab could have been better.

Methods in molecular biology: This lab was about learning the different methods used in molecular biology such as ELISA for protein analysis, DNA genotpying and so on. We also analysed the data using the software package R. The lab was good in terms of learning these methods however it was a little too long Some of the lectures post lab discussions we had were in my opinion not necessary. Instead, more time could have been dedicated to the research application instead.

Blood grouping: This was a rather fun lab! We got to determine our own blood groups. A short, easy and fun lab!

Integration of theory and practice, 5 ECTS

The last module includes the lectures and seminars. The theoretical part of this course is a mixture of all the courses we have had so far such as atherosclerosis, T cell immunity and so on. There is a lot more detail involved this time so I think it is a good way to end the theoretical course part of the programme.

This concludes the course review. I will be back with some more fun blogs about Swedish Christmas and the student related activities at Karolinska Institutet in the upcoming blogs.

That’s all for now!

See you around.

Nishi

nishi.dave@stud.ki.se