My personal experience as a former student in the MSc Clinical and Psychosocial Epidemiology

I am Matheus! I am from Brazil, where I studied medicine. For me, the most important part of Clinical and Psychosocial Epidemiology is how we get prepared to do research before starting it. In some places in Brazil, you would just have to start with your research and try to figure out how to do it along the way. Here, we had a nicely structured programme that prepared us for every step.

Small groups and multicultural

The small groups allowed our classes to be more interactive and allowed us to create a stronger bond with the other students, which is particularly important for international students. The multicultural environment, which was often used as a theme of discussion during/alongside some of our courses, helped to shape students to think outside the box. The discussions made you realise how you just take things for granted sometimes as people shared their different perspectives and methods. The discussions allowed us to gain different perspectives towards topics, thereby broadening our understanding of the topics. 

We also always received support from the programme coordinators and teachers. Additionally, there were coach groups to help with issues related to the subjects studied or with the psychological aspects of the process. We also had contact with professionals from many different fields, which helped us get used to working in big multidisciplinary teams.

From master’s student to PhD

We learned many transferrable skills, which go further than merely learning the subject we were working on. This became very evident when I had contact with other first-year PhD students during the “Managing your PhD” course at the start of my PhD. During our discussions, it became apparent that I had a concrete understanding of what it was to do research, how to organise my project, and how to make use of the opportunities available to me. So the transition from being a master's student to a researcher happened in a much smoother way because of having studied CPE.

All in all, CPE was an incredible personal experience, where I made a lot of friends, and through which I became more independent and confident by learning the tools to perform good research. By the way, being nervous is part of the process, but understand that you don't need to have everything perfect from the beginning. You are here to learn and everybody knows that!