Students from all over the world

The next day after the brunch meet­ing, the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram “Hu­man Biol­ogy – Prin­ciples of Health and Dis­ease” com­menced with the first man­dato­ry mod­ule "Methods in Bio­medi­cal Sci­en­ces“. The mod­ule covers the most com­monly used meth­ods of mo­lecu­lar biolo­gy based on the ex­em­plary nucle­ar pro­tein PCNA, which plays an im­portant role in a range of essen­tial pro­cesses such as DNA repli­cation and DNA repair.

The stu­dents are not only asked to apply standard mo­lecu­lar tech­niques, but are also chal­lenged to un­der­stand and scru­tinize the un­derly­ing prin­ciples and biolo­gy. To com­plete their un­der­stand­ing of mo­lecu­lar biolo­gy, the course "Methods in Bio­medi­cal Sci­en­ces” is em­bed­ded in the addi­tional man­dato­ry “Computa­tional Biol­ogy” course, which di­rectly pre­pares for the wet lab course on the one hand and on the other hand allows mean­ingful inter­preta­tion and evalu­ation of data ob­tained dur­ing the course.

In a sur­vey, stu­dents said that at first they felt over­whelmed by all the new in­for­mation and won­dered if they would be able to get along with the other peo­ple and adapt to the changed envi­ron­ment. But in the end, every­thing went smoothly and they are very happy with their classmates and the pro­fes­sors, who are very sup­portive in mak­ing every­thing man­agea­ble.

After a short time on the pro­gram, stu­dents lost any initial fears and felt moti­vated and excit­ed about the com­mon path of stud­ies. They have de­scribed them­selves, among others, with the words "kind", "smart", "friendly", "sup­portive " and "close-knit".

Fo­cused on the Elite Graduate Program, all stu­dents con­firmed that the MHB Pro­gram has met most of their ex­pecta­tions so far and that they were look­ing for­ward to choosing their professor-mentor, who will ac­com­pany them through the stud­ies. They char­acter­ized their graduate pro­gram with more than 45 dif­ferent posi­tive words, the most men­tioned were "per­fect", "de­manding" and "en­riching".

Apart from the cur­ricu­lum the stu­dents gladly ac­cept­ed the invi­tation of the Elite Net­work of Ba­varia to the "Get Togeth­er" event. They received a lot of in­for­mation about the offers of the network and took the chance to get in con­tact with other peo­ple across sub­ject boundaries. They are all look­ing for­ward to the next steps and events of the graduate pro­gram.

Text:  Irini Bassios, Coordination Elite Graduate Program "Human Biology - Principles of Health and Disease"