Career prospects
The Alumnitool on LinkedIn can help you gain insight into possible careers after you finish your degree. It can also help you get in contact with an alumnus or alumna of your degree programme or other programmes. Nearly all graduates have a LinkedIn profile and can answer questions about your future career. They’re often more than happy to share their experiences with you. The video belows explains how the alumnitool works, and how you can use search criteria to find career information that is relevant to you.
Would you like to know more about how you can use LinkedIn to expand your network and put the new information into practice straight away? Take the LinkedIn workshop from Career Services. The workshop Exploring the job market & networking is also useful if you'd like to improve your networking skills, using LinkedIn and other ways.
It's quite a switch from the courses to the internship, particularly the working routine, but it soon turned out to be really enjoyable. You start off with reading some literature and planning the internship, then you will do your first experiments in the lab under supervision, but soon you can work on your own.
“The first six weeks of the Master's you will follow the courses Clinical Immunology, Bacterial Pathogenesis, and Virology. These courses are pretty intense, but also very interesting and interactive and they give you a good level of knowledge before you start your first internship.
During my first internship, I worked within a research group that I had already got to know over a period of ten weeks during my Bachelor’s Biomedical Sciences. It's quite a switch from the courses to the internship, particularly the working routine, but it soon turned out to be really enjoyable. You start off with reading some literature and planning the internship, then you will do your first experiments in the lab under supervision, but soon you can work on your own. Being able to independently perform experiments for the first time is really a great feeling.
You will do two internships: one in Infection and the other in Immunity. My first internship was in Immunity, so I looked for an Infection-based research group for my second internship. During the Infection & Immunity Symposium there was a group leader from the Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and he talked about his research on malaria vaccines. This sounded really interesting to me, so after the presentation I asked him whether they take on students for an internship. I contacted him a few months later to actually arrange my internship in this group. But you can also arrange an internship abroad through the coordinator of the Master’s programme.
I now have a job as a PhD student in the lab where I completed my first internship. The head of the group asked me at the time whether I might be interested in coming back. I did take a look around at different research groups but I liked this group the best and this is the research that I find most interesting. I am working on antibodies that can kill tumour cells and the receptors that those antibodies can bind to.”
Arianne Brandsma (24), is a PhD student at the Labratory of Translational Immunology UMC Utrecht.