Health Science Reviews

By Michaela Papangeli

Our first semester of the Honours programme was incredible! From being on a new gorgeous campus, being part of an Honours group composed of the most amazing group of girls to learning so much about my field of interest: Human Genetics. Despite the change from an undergraduate degree to a post graduate degree, our first semester was very similar to undergraduate in most aspects. We had a schedule, we attended lectures, and we wrote tests and exams.

However, on the 11th of July we put our pens down for the last time after writing our final exam and everything changed. That was the end of university as we know it. Now, diving into semester two, everything feels different. We no longer have lectures, we don’t have an hourly timetable to follow like we’re used to, and we no longer write tests and exams. Instead, what awaits us are our Honours projects. My Honours project involves a lot of Bioinformatics which is something I haven’t done a lot of. As excited as I am to get started with it, I’m just as nervous about not being able to figure it out. It all feels very daunting.

However, it’s now three weeks into the semester and I’m loving my project! The first bioinformatics part was a bit of a struggle but through a lot of trial and error, and incredible support from my supervisors it got done! I am now designing my primers and am looking forwards to the rest of my project and am excited for what’s to come! I feel so grateful to be here and am thoroughly enjoying it! It’s crazy that in just three weeks I went from being so nervous about starting this project to enjoying every second of it! It just shows that nerves aren’t always a bad thing and everything is possible if you put the effort in and want it bad enough!