Tessa Chevallier & Paul-Adrien Alves

We decided to come to IBMI at the University of Ljubljana for our Erasmus exchange as students from the Ensai, a French school for statistics. We found the institute by looking for European universities with research units in biostatistics.

This internship provided us insight into the work of a biostatistician by having us learn and use tools extremely important in the field that we were not familiar with. Working with researchers and PhD students like at IBMI had the additional benefit of introducing us to the world of research and gave us the tools to look at it with a critical eye. A lot of knowledge is available here, from the educational books covering both beginner and advanced topics, the research papers the university grants access to, to the expertise of the statisticians. It was a very valuable experience for us as we are specializing in biostatistics next year for the last year of our masters.

Carina Miller

During my master studies in Mathematical Biometrics at Ulm University, Germany, I did an ERASMUS+ exchange at the University of Ljubljana. Here, the Master’s programme Applied Statistics offers lectures in the field of Biostatistics, which suited my studies very well. That is why Ljubljana was my first choice for ERASMUS+ exchange and I am very happy that I got the spot!

My lectures were a variety of topics in Biostatistics and held by the Medical faculty of the University of Ljubljana; by the department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. They were held in English on demand. What I appreciated a lot is that they are more applied and practical than at my home university. Like this, I gained deeper knowledge in the application of methods and in programming. The courses were very small and hence, getting in contact with the Sloveme students was very easy. Also, it was easy to get in contact with the professors and they were always happy to help with any questions. I felt very welcomed by them in their courses!

All in all, I would definitely recommend coming to Ljubljana and the department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics for an ERASMUS+ exchange! Not only the institute and the courses were great, but also the ESN is doing an amazing job in Ljubljana! They will guarantee that everyone on ERAMUS will have a great time here, will have the chance to go to many parties and trips and will meet a lot of other ERASMUS students who come to Ljubljana from all over Europe!

Sarah Stadlinger

I came to the University of Ljubljana as an Erasmus student from Ulm, Germany. I chose Ljubljana because the Applied Statistics program, which corresponds to my program at home, was advertised as teaching statistics in a very applied way, with a lot of practical background and real-life scenarios in a very familiar environment. This turned out to be true when I arrived in Ljubljana. The Slovenian students were very friendly and happy to welcome me and another Erasmus student to their university. We had a Slovenian tutor who helped us with university courses, showed us around Ljubljana and became a good friend. I chose the course Event History Analysis, where I learned a lot about using R for event history analysis. We prepared exercise sheets on datasets with real background and learned how to interpret them in the context of the dataset. I also chose the statistical consulting course, where I followed a team of statisticians from IBMI as they tried to help a medical PhD student with the data management and statistics part of his thesis. This gave me a valuable insight into working with non-statisticians and an insight into the work of the Institute.

In addition to the studies, Ljubljana is a great city for an Erasmus semester. The city is beautiful and many events and trips are organized for foreign students. All in all, my Erasmus semester was an enrichment in all aspects, personal growth, a great time and biostatistical experience.