The beginning of my experience

I am Timmy, a student of HOWEST university of applied sciences. This is my last year in my bachelors degree and we have to do an internschip, I chose to do this abroad at TAMK in Tampere Finland. This blog is made to take you with me and hopefully convince you to do an internship abroad if you still have doubt if you want to do this.

I came to Tampere a couple days before the beginning of my internship at TAMK. The reason I did this was because I wanted to settle in and get to know the city. This all went relatively good, not everything went according to plan but it wasn’t bad. I do recommend making a list with things you need to buy when you arrive to make things easier.

In the first week of my internship at TAMK was not really productive, but that was expected it is only the start after all. I did a lot of reading because the acces to the labs are restricted and acces is only given after you read all the complementary documents. This reading was accompanied with a general induction to get to know the office and labs. I also shadowed my supervisor in the lab while she was explaining what one of my tasks is going to be. Nothing much happend for the rest.

In the second week I got the induction for the fish lab so now i can acces it to do my work. After the induction, I went to the lab to start the protocol that I am to follow in the lab. While I was doing this my supervisor was shadowing me, the protocol doesn’t contain anything that I haven’t done before yet but it still makes me nervous to have someone breathing in my neck watching what I do. There were some wait times because of which the protocol was split up between different days. While doing lab work just make sure you are aware of all the steps you need to do because I forgot to add the gel red when i was doing a gel electrophoresis, luckily it is possible to stain the gel with gel red afterwards, so no harm done.  On the moments I wasn’t in the lab i was reading articles that my supervisor gave to me.