First semester in Msc. Molecular Biotechnology (Part I)

Today I’ll give you some information about the first semester of the Master in Molecular Biotechnology and its courses. 

HERE I SHARE MY OWN OPINION IN DIFFERENT ASPECTS. Which may differ with yours. 

First of all, the semesters are divided in 2 halves. The courses Experimental Methods and Biostatistics are developed during the whole semester, on the contrary Bioinformatics and Biotechnology only last one half of the semester. Each half of semester is called “period”.

Also, it is important that you know that you would not have your schedule for the whole semester, the next periods’ are uploaded once the previous one is getting to its end. So if you are planing to travel or going back to your countries for the Christmas holidays or something like that, try to talk with your teachers [#AlbaAdvice]

1^st period:

Bioinformatics

In this course you’ll learn how to use different bioinformatic tools regarding sequences analysis, homology analysis, expression analysis and so on.  You won’t have any exam of the subject, but you’ll have 3 assignments to do. For the first one you’ll have more time and it’s the longest, the other ones will come one after the other so, don’t fall sleep! 

As an advice, you don’t really have to take notes of the subject; everything is written in the pdfs that would be uploaded after the lecture has taken place.  One last thing, have patience and use the supervision classes for doing the class exercises, but also do not doubt to start with your assignments in the computer labs too.

Biostatistics

Are you afraid of statistics? Don’t you have any good experience related to them? 

 Forget about all of that because you’ll learn a lot in this course and you would even enjoy them. Andreas is a wonderful teacher (<3) , his lectures and slides are very illustrative and you’ll get out of the class with the sensation that you’ve learnt something. If you are taking the 2 years master, you’ll be using R, which has its own programming language. If you are taking the 1 year master, you’ll be using SPSS. In this course you’ll need to submit 3 assignments based on the application of what you’ve learnt from the lectures to different exercises, 1 assignment based on the analysis of data you’ll collect after a laboration work from the course Experimental methods and design in molecular biology and another assignment that will be a jornal club focused on the statistics of a paper of your own choice. #AlbaAdvice: Read carefully the course memo and it’s nice if you study the slides before you start with the assignments, even if you don’t really need it to do them, but you’ll get a wider knowledge of what you are doing. This was for me the most enjoyable course of last semester. 

 Part II ... Tomorrow!!!

Vi ses!!