Student blogs

Hej everyone!

Back in June, we finished our first year of masters which means one more academic year to go! 💃🏽 Ending this year felt really good after seeing the accomplishments and the friendships we made in uni. And now I’m currently enjoying summer! ☀️ Personally, my second semester was extremely intense since I took elective courses outside of my programme. I will leave that for another blog post. Now, I will reflect on the rest of the biomedicine master courses I took.

Bioinformatics

Our bioinformatics course introduces several aspects of the field. It consisted of lectures/workshops, computer lab assignments and a final online examination. Some of the topics we touched upon are BLAST and multiple sequence analysis, protein structure, systems biology, proteomics, and phylogeny. In order to interpret different results, we used several online tools such as Chimera, BLAST programs, cancer genomics portal, and protein databases. Each week there was an online assignment on a different topic. There was some assistance from the teachers while working on these assignments, but personally, I learned more when I worked with my classmates. We submitted the assignments as a Word doc and some received feedback that did not correlate with the objectives of the workshop. Therefore, some students had to redo some of the assignments while others didn’t.

The course leaders are working on improving the course for future students. Although bioinformatics is not my cup of tea, I still think that it is a very useful subject since most of our research requires these online tools to validate/interpret results, as well as explore certain proteins/amino acids/miRNAs in a disease state. I certainly learned something new since I did not have sufficient previous knowledge. If you want to deepen your knowledge within this area, you need additional courses and workshops.

(TIP: If you took a previous bioinformatics course during your undergraduate education, you might be able to transfer the credits and skip this course. Few students were able to do that. Just check with the course leaders in advance.)

Biostatistics

This was one of the courses that I was really looking forward to due to one main reason  ➡️our teacher Paolo Frumento. We had him for our biostatistics course during the bachelor programme. He is such an exceptional lecturer when it comes to explaining statistics. He starts with the basics and then digs deeper into the subject. This biostatistics course was more advanced compared to the one in my bachelor programme. It also consisted of lectures and computer labs using the R program. 📊 📈

The course was divided into three sections:

1. Basic statistical terms and concepts, including confidence interval and statistic tests
2. Linear and logistic regression, multiple regression, and model building
3. Statistical methods in bioinformatics

I genuinely enjoyed this course and recommend not to skip any computer labs because these assignments are essential for studying the final exam.

Got any questions about student life or biomedicine?

Contact me via my email. 🙂

e-mail: sara.abu.ajamieh@stud.ki.se

LinkedIn: Sara Abu Ajamieh