Meet out Interns - Otto Boldemann

Please briefly describe yourself and what you do.

My name is Otto Boldemann, I am 28 years old, and I am a medical student at Karolinska Institutet. 

Please describe why did you want to do an internship at the Karolinska ALS Clinical Research Center.

I actually stumbled upon a shorter documentary of a former football player being diagnosed with ALS and raising awareness within the Allsvenskan (swedish premier football division) community. I was moved by his story, and curous of about the disease - and wanted to see if there was ALS research connected to KI, leading me to find the resarch group through the website. 

How long did your intership at the Karolinska ALS Clinical Research Center last?

Formally over my 8th semester, so about 4 months, but I’m still working part time with the group and currently doing another summer internship 😊

Please describe your internship project, research questions, documents used (ex : TakeCare, ALS/MND Registry, data-base, etc...).

We investigated cerebrospinal fluid readouts, analysed with proteomics tools, to see if protein levels corrleated with clinically meaningful outcomes – such as ALS phenotype, how fast the disease progresses, and mortality. I used the ALS/MND registry, and proteomic readouts from our co-operating group at SciLifeLab. 

What did you learn during your internship at the Karolinska ALS Clinical Research Center?

So much, I got a lot more confident in many statistical analysees which I didn’t grasp at all from the start. I learned how to use R, how to form a research question and the research pipeline in general. I also learned a lot about motor neuron diseases in general, the pathogenesis and clinical signs, which was very useful for the upcoming neurology rotation I had!

What challenges did you face during your internship at the Karolinska ALS Clinical Research Center?

I struggled with the programming aspect at first, I was very new to using R, having previously mostly worked within python (and was very much a beginner there too). Thankfully I got help from my supervisor and other lab collagues, everyone was so friendly and willing to help which was very nice coming in as an intern.

Are you satisfied with your overall experience at the Karolinska ALS Clinical Research Center? If yes, please share with us what you enjoyed the most during your internship. If not, please share what did not meet your expectations so we can improve ourselves.

I am extremely satisfied!

Please share with us what is the key information or learning experience you will keep from this internship.

Something that I learned that I still think about is how much work goes into just preparing your data, organising it and keeping it tidy. This makes a lot of sense in retrospect, but it was a learning experience for me, wanting to get started on all the analysees, not realing that most of the time consuming work is organising and preparing the data to even be able to carry out any analysis.

Would you recomment the Karolinska ALS Clinical Research Center to a friend or colleague?

Of course!