MSc in Precision Cancer Medicine

During my time as a student in the MSc Precision Cancer Medicine, we covered a range of topics relevant to the field, which catered to students from a wide range of academic and working backgrounds. As a working professional, it was really useful to be able to work through lectures at my own pace whenever I had time. Each week everything was split into short mini-lectures, making it easy to fit around other commitments. We still had some live sessions on Zoom, which were also fairly flexible with multiple timeslots, which gave us an opportunity to interact as a cohort and get to know fellow students, discuss concepts and ideas, and review the course content.

To sit the exam, we got to spend the week in Oxford staying at St Anne’s College together as a cohort, where we had a week of interactive revision sessions, socialising, and seeing the sights of Oxford. I had the opportunity to complete a lab-based project in Oxford for my dissertation in the final few months, which was a good opportunity to gain important lab skills and interact with research groups at the university. Overall, this MSc gave me a broad knowledge base of cutting-edge precision medicine concepts and lab experience, which have been invaluable in preparing me for PhD study.

This MSc course has opened to me new horizons in academic research and provided me with the framework and confidence not only to navigate but to help others navigate the ever-evolving field of modern precision cancer medicine. I appreciated the various perspectives on precision medicine that the course offered, ranging from molecular biology, bioinformatics, ethics, pathology, imaging, therapeutics, clinical trials, and regulatory aspects, as well as the global perspective.

The tutors are highly motivated academic professionals and for their guidance, I am very grateful. I particularly enjoyed the small group tutorials which allowed close interaction with the teachers. One should however have no illusions about the time requirements of the course, the estimate of 20 hours/week is realistic. On the other hand, the flexibility of multimedia-assisted self-learning enabled me to finish the course on my tempo, even if I stayed behind on occasion because I was working full-time in the clinics during the course.

Finally, besides the course itself, the institution lives up to the high standards that its reputation suggests. Administration allows access to a number of additional 'soft skills' courses provided by the University of Oxford. I took for example courses on academic writing, leadership, teaching as well as bioinformatics. Summarising, though the course was at times challenging, it was rewarding and I would definitively recommend it.