The External Practice is a mandatory module that involves 375 hours of student work within a company or a research group. The students may choose to do the internship in a research center, if they are planning in the future to engage in basic research, or in private companies or hospitals to develop the career in applied fields.

During the first semester, the module coordination will provide a list with offers from companies and institutions for the MSc in Bioinformatics students. The students can choose based on their preferences among the available projects in the offered list and the coordination will ensure proper communication between the student and the responsible person in the company or institution.

If the student wants to do their internship in a company or institution outside of those in the provided list, the student will need to deliver a description of the project and the institution information so that the proposal can be evaluated by a comission.

It is the student’s responsibility to find the company or research group where they will do the professional practice.

Once found, they must communicate it to the module coordination and apply for an agreement between the UAB and the institution.

The module coordination will assign an academic tutor from the UAB who ensures the correct development of the student's internship when it is done outside of the UAB.

The application for the agreement will be submitted to the Academic Administration office of the Faculty of Biosciences at least 1 month before the beginning of the internship. After that, the Academic Administration staff will get in touch with both the student and the responsible person at the company/institution to have the final agreement signed.

Annotation: within the schedule set by the centre or degree programme, 15 minutes of one class will be reserved for students to evaluate their lecturers and their courses or modules through questionnaires.

The External Practice Module will be evaluated using a follow-up and evaluation report, written by the project supervisor at the institution/company (70%) and with the grading of the student’s practice report (30%).

The student must ensure that the module coordinator receives both documents: practice report and tutor's evaluation report.

Students will obtain the grade of "Not assessed" when the evaluated activities have a weight of less than 67% in the final grade.

Use of AI

For this subject, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies is allowed exclusively in support tasks, such as bibliographic or information search, text correction or translations. The student must identify clearly which parts have been generated with this technology, specify the tools used, and include a critical reflection on how they have influenced the process and the final result of the activity. Non-transparency of the use of AI in this activity or its use for tasks where this is not allowed will be considered a lack of academic honesty and may result in a partial or total penalty in the grade of the activity, or greater penalties in serious cases.

The performance of any irregularity in an evaluation act (academic fraud, plagiarism or improper use of AI, unless such use is expressly authorized in the teaching guide) that may lead to a significant variation in the grade, means that this act will be graded with a 0. If the teaching guide provides that, in order to pass the subject, it is an essential requirement to have obtained a minimum grade in this evaluation act or that there are several irregularities in the evaluation acts of the same subject, the final grade will be 0. Apart from this, a disciplinary process may be initiated against the student who incurs in these irregularities.