Studying in Lund

The main reason of me going abroad was of course to study, next to all the new friends and activities. That is the reason I’m going to tell you something about studying in Lund now.

I really like studying in Lund: the teachers are close with the students and the lectures are interactive. Maybe that is why Lund reached the top 60 in the latest QS World University. For the criteria of academic reputation and percentage of international students, they are even ranked number one! For me this is of course a good thing as the amount of international students is really high in Lund. This makes contact with other internationals easy.  and learn about their countries really common.

The first course I am following is ‘Drug Development’. We learn everything about the processes of making suitable medicines. We learn what the best way to deliver a drug:  orally or as an injection. Another topic of the course is to figure out what kind of other substances are needed in the drug next to the active substance. The course contains many lectures but also some case studies and 4 afternoons of laboratory work. For this laboratory work, you have to make your own production master or laboratory plan. This makes it really clear what you are actually doing during the laboratory work. One laboratory contained the making of your own aspirin tablets. We made this tablet with a tableting machine as you can see in the picture. Afterwards we compared different properties from our tablet with the properties from an already existing tablet.


The other course I am following is ‘Medicinal Chemistry’ and it consists mainly of lectures but also a couple of days of assignments. After making the assignments at home you will compare your outcomes with your group. When you are sure you have the right answer you can show this to the rest of the class on the chalkboard. The course is really oriented towards the organic chemistry and the knowledge of what every different side chain or element has for influence on a molecule structure. Sometimes some nice fun-facts are told. For example, a couple of medicines were discovered while developing a medicine for another disease (for example Viagra). This course is a little bit more difficult than the drug development course, but nevertheless really interesting.

So far I think that the study system here in Lund is really good and advanced. The grading system here is different compared to the Wageningen system where you get a mark between 1 and 10. Here you will get a mark between 1 and 5. You need at least a 3 to pass the course. Let’s hope I will pass the exams in three weeks!

Hej då!