My Exchange at Lund University, Autumn Semester 2014

Exchanging at Lund was my choice long before I applied, and the best thing is, I have no idea why I wanted to come to Lund. Could it be the appeal of southern Sweden? How the LU advertising pamphlet just shouted out to me during the GEM event in school? But once I looked at the picture of LU, I was sold.

Starting on this exchange journey was not easy, because of my reservations about so many things, it almost seemed like i had reservations about everything. How i’d cope being away from my boyfriend, family, and basically everything and anything familiar. I knew I was bad with change. I couldn’t even move house without feeling depressed. And suddenly I was throwing myself into this scary but exciting prospect of moving to a European country and being among ang mohs for a good 5 months of my uni life. Of course, as with all students going on exchange, we’re super concerned about our grades on exchange — NOT. I couldn’t care less, especially being from SBS, where they are quite lax with the course matching requirements. As long as you matched your normal course load (18AUs) with the normal course load in your destination country (30ECTS, for Sweden), you’d be fine with credit transferring.

This post is specially for those coming to Lund on exchange this sem or subsequent sems. I’m writing this because I know how scary the prospect of coming here is and also because I couldn’t really find a comprehensive enough guide to surviving and thriving in Lund (albeit being sort of a loner, I hope you came here with friends!)

BEFORE COMING

Okay so i did ALOT of research before I came to Lund. Like ALOT. To the point that I thought I was gonna get cui marks for exams last sem because of the degree to which I was concentrated on researching for this. One reason was because I thought I was gonna go for exchange alone.

The first thing I looked at was, of course, course matching. Course matching for SBS Yr3Sem1 was not that easy for Lund. Many other unis had better course matching like Hertfordshire in the UK and McGill in Canada, and if i’m not wrong, even Bern in Switz.

But either way, the courses I matched (and managed to get) were VMFB14 Molecular Medicine, BIMM30 Molecular Microbial Pathogenesis and BIMM31 Virology. Others I matched but didn’t get were Neurobiology, Plant Biology, basically all the courses I could match under the Biology Faculty. The courses i did take, however, were under the Medical Faculty.

COURSES I TOOK

BIMM30 and 31 were Masters courses under the Medical Faculty (Biomedicine). I’d recommend taking both of these courses because I enjoyed them greatly, even though the timetables were quite unfavourable for travel. BIMM30 had the most important class on Friday, which comprised of research presentations (relax, it’s other Profs doing presentations about their research). The funniest thing about this course was the assessment, which was 2 days of exam. The first day was for you and your partner to come up with about 4 questions for the exam. Then the Prof will grade your questions and then compile all the questions and you’ll have a online exam the next day that you can do at home (yes, you can sit with friends) and collaborate to do the exam. Of course it’s not allowed, but EXAM. Another thing is the one week lab attachment we have to do in each Masters course. In BIMM30, you can’t choose your group and my friend even got posted to Malmo, but for BIMM31, we could choose group (sortof) and all lab attachments were in Lund.

BIMM31 had different activities for each week so if you wanna travel across a long weekend, you have to plan early and really fight for your spot in the group you want. Makes it easier since you should already know some people in the group if you took BIMM30. But Virology was the best mod I took. Learnt so much and I think I would much rather take this mod here than back in NTU because this Prof is so knowledgeable and awesome. Also, by far the easiest to study (for me) for cos it’s the most like an exam back home.

VMFB14. Sigh. What should I say about this mod? I didn’t like it one bit because of the PBLs omg. PBL is the acronym for Problem-Based Learning and we all didn’t like it. It’s this thing where groups of 6 sit together for 2 hours in the afternoon after morning lecture and you get a case study to discuss which has something to do with the topic of the week. We always couldn’t find anything to say cos we have different academic backgrounds and knowledge so this was an experience, and definitely challenging. You’d probably be better off trying Plant Bio or something. Heard there are also PBLs for that though. So I’m not sure how fun that will be too. Possibly the only good thing about this course is probably that the schedule is damn good. Like Mondays and Fridays are completely free, giving you a good 4 days for travelling per week. On the downside, it’s november, december and january, which means that alot of outdoor stuff like open air museums are closed and it’s also not that easy to walk around alot outside cos it’s freezing.