Lets be honest, the future of medicinal research in Sweden isn't particularly bright. Astra Zeneca will be bankrupt in 10-20 years since their last profitable patents will expire quite soon. The Swedish rules and massive bureaucracy around animal trials becomes stricter and stricter and the Swedish economy will become more and more fragile when more capital flows into the flourishing economies of India and China. Since I have a passion for neurology and Astra fired their entire neurology department of about 2000 persons a couple of years back, it's important that I get a foot into the international employment market. No matter your views on the future of Sweden, medicinal research is as you know an international employment market, so the odds are that the demand of the particular expertise you'll have acquired in a decade, will come from a foreign country. Therefore it's good for you to know beforehand if you can handle all what swapping country is.To swap country for a while is by far the easiest way to break up dusty old habits and routines, which you've had for so long that you've become blind for them and which aren't necessarily good for you. The new social circles you move in and the new new actions you take abroad reflects a more authentic updated You. It's what you become if old habits and relations, which you got when you were someone else, the past you, are stripped of for while. It sounds cheesy, but a long journey is a catalyst for personal growth and you can always move home again if you aren't happy with what the new country turned you into. You can keep the best and throw away the worst in yourself.

I chose Australia because I had an urge for an exotic experience without the massive culture-crash I though Singapore would be. I've always been interested in the Australian fauna and I remained fully convinced that much of it will have disappeared in 30 years. Let's face it, Australians unsustainable exploitation of the very limited soil and water reserves will have the natural consequence of a radically changed continent three decades in the future. Most marsupials are basically an evolutionary appendix, they should have been out-competed millions of years ago. I choose Sydney because it's the biggest city on the continent. I thought that the bigger the city, the higher the concentration of everything, the higher percentage of eccentric people and the greater the potential for adventures. In retrospect, the adventure potential is probably greater in Melbourne since it's more compact and has better public transport but you can certainly have a very good time in Sydney. All you need is a little bit of free-time, a little bit of money and an open mind. I chose UNSW mostly because in contrast to the University of Sydney, UNSW does not require that you have an average grade of B to enrol you. My impression of UNSW is that it's a university with a rich student life and a university which is world leading in a wide array of fields. For you who's doing a project work in the biomedicine program, the application process starts with you finding a supervisor at UNSW. Then you both need to send in one application each electronically to the practicum exchange program. The application process takes quite a bit of time and meanwhile you're stressed up about the cancer course. My tip is that you start the process early on and see to it that you also make your supervisor do his/her part early on. Late in the registration process you're charged with an administration fee of 330 AUD (About 2200 SEK). You can find some more information about the application process here:

http://www.internation.unsw.edu.au/study/research-exchange-program/practicum-exchange/#

Remember to apply early for all ethical permits you might need to conduct your experiment. If possible, do it before entering the country, since that bureaucracy can easily eat up what little time you have to actually gather data in your lab. It's recommended to have been vaccinated against hepatitis A before travelling to Australia but the virus barely exist on the continent any more. Of course you need a visa to enter the country, but if the only passport you've got is a Swedish one and you're only applying for a student visa that will be sorted out quite quickly. Late in your application process to UNSW the practicum exchange program will give you a number. You fill in this number together with lots of personal information in an application form at the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protections web page. To fill in the form takes an hour or two and less than a month later you get your visa which is basically a number electronically connected to your passport. It costs 535 AUD, (about 3500 SEK). The number is accepted as your almost everywhere.

The Australian customs is infamous for confiscating seemingly absurd things.You need a written permit in English together with the prescription to bring in prescription drugs in the country (has to be carried in the hand luggage) and another permit to bring in prescription drugs for more than 30 days consumption, it doesn't matter if it's vital to your survival or not. Since the continent has bad experiences with ecological contamination, there's more fruit-sniffing than drug-sniffing police dogs, and woe you who tries to bring nuts, seeds or wooden material over the border. Read up carefully regarding the rules of restricted imports before packing and remember that strict ecological control can be enforced also when you're flying between states. See to it that you have an address to give up for your immediate stay upon arrival, the border security wants to hear that you're going to sleep somewhere else than the street.

It took 28 days from my arrival in Sydney until I got a room in town. Under this time I lived in a dorm in a really trashy but cheep hostel. Don't do that. Living in a dorm means you're sleeping horribly since people are snoring, having sex or charging in drunk 2 o'clock at night. Backpackers are a lively multi-cultural people. I miss a great deal of them I lived with but you do not want to share a sleeping area with them. Constantly looking for housing, exhaustion and the stress over being homeless made me unable to focus on the read-up phase of my project. This came back and hit me in the face when it was time to write the report and that's one reason to why it was 1.5 months overdue.

If you aren't rich you wont be able to avoid staying in a hostel at least the first week. Sleep with your wallet during this period and make sure that your valuables are stored safely. Invest some time in socializing with the other guests at the place. It's an easy way to meet people who've come to town to make Sydney their playground. So, if possible you should be in town a month before your project starts, you should also come a bit before the start of the semester (24th of February) since the apartment rush is at its worst the week before the start of the new semester. If you should find a room the first week that's not a waste either since you'll then have extra time to explore Sydney and maybe travel.

Don't travel with Handelsbanken. If your card-reader or your internet-card breaks, that bank won't think twice about leaving you stranded on the other side of the world without access to your bank accounts. This happened to me. From what I've heard Nordea is good to go abroad with but of course you want to get an Australian bank account as fast as possible. Commonwealth bank worked good for me. Student accounts are free of charge with them and opening such an account takes less than an hour. You'll get your VISA-card in about two weeks, until then, cash is king. Remember to close your account before leaving Australia since a monthly charge is added to the account when you end your studies in the country and you can't close it from outside Australia. Also get an Australian phone number quickly since no one wants to talk to a +46 number (very important when looking for apartments), the easiest phoning solution is to get a prepaid SIM from Optus. It takes 30 minutes to get your number and costs about 30 AUD a month.

UNSW has an introduction day once a week for newly arrived practicum exchange students (Ph:D students, honour students and us doing a one semester project work in lab), it gave me all the information I needed. When you register as a student on the spot you're charged an additional registration fee. It was less than 300 AUD from what I remember.

You'll probably be pretty broke in Sydney because of your high rent, but the city is filled with broke people who manages to entertain themselves and others royally anyway. Food at Coles and Woolsworth (their version of ICA and Coop) is somewhat more expensive than in Sweden, but it's also cheaper to dine out. I recommend the Indian place at UNSW, Kensington campus, in the cafeteria, behind the library. It's cheep and surprisingly good. You haven't had proper Indian food before you've gone to Australia. Public transport is an expense which easily gets out of hand since there are different ticket systems for trains, trams and buses and you also have to pay once more when switching bus. Since I lived in the suburb Croydon, the cheapest solution was to buy a monthly my multi 1 card for 175 AUD/month (about 1150 SEK). Think about the layout of public transport pay-zones when choosing your housing. A small comfort is that the alcohol prise is about 25% cheaper than in Sweden. This does not stop Aussies from loudly complaining about the state enforced oppression of unreasonable alcohol tax and of forcing the liquor stores in the city centre to close at the early hour of 22.

As you've probably realized by now, there's nowhere to live in Sydney, which is the most important factor speaking against going on exchange there. The relatively small core makes up about 10% of the city. It has skyscrapers and a large town pulse, it's here the majority of all clubs, pubs and restaurants are located and it's here that everything happens. the 90% rest of the city is just suburbs which continue forever and ever. The suburbs consists of quite ugly settler-houses where nothing happens unless there's a house party. The residents stoical determination to not build more sky-scrapers in a city of 4.6 millions inhabitants, combined with a public transport system straight out of the 70-ties, has had the natural consequence of rents within 1 hour from the centre soaring to great heights. Another consequence is that when something awesome is going down, odds are you might not get there until it's over. From what I've heard Melbourne is different since her citizens have started building more sky-scrapers and public transport works.
In Sydney the apartments in Bondi, where the UNSW Kensington campus is located, are highly sought after due to their location close to the beach. UNSW won't fix housing for you since you won't stay for longer than a semester and their rents are outrageous even for Bondi so you don't want to stay there anyway. In Sydney, generally speaking, if a room has a lower rent than 200AUD/week there's probably something wrong with it. Maybe it's located directly over a train station or have a really serious vermin-infection. I'm writing room because studio-flats barely exist so you'll have to make do with a room in a share-house/share-apartment. I paid 220 AUD/week (roughly 6150SEK/month), bills included, for a quite large room in what had previously been a brothel in Croydon, it took about 1 hour and 20 minutes to get to campus from my door. Fun fact, I could hear the Sunday mass from the catholic church on the other side of the street so the opposite must have been true in the days when the brothel was active. The house was built by settlers which meant that a lot of things didn't work. We had some rats and plenty of cockroaches and other insects, especially in the kitchen. You won't get away from cockroaches in Sydney no matter where you live. We neither had radiators nor air conditioning. Since Aussies don't understand the concept of isolation it can get very cold inside, even if the temperature outdoors only gets down to 12 degrees Celsius. It can very well be colder inside than outside and it's a cold you'll have to live with constantly. The house I lived in was very worn down but not the worst I've heard of. A course mate to me lived with a broken window for 3 months. Since it's the landlords market he/she doesn't really need to renovate often. For unknown reasons the IT-infrastructure in Australia is much slower than in Europe and the routers have shorter range. Up to 30 mbts/s is the fastest you can get as a private consumer.

Something which makes the high rent more manageable is the average Sydney citizens attitude to the recycling of furniture. Instead of driving unwanted furniture to the dump they simply put them on the side-walk. This gesture is Australian for:
"Take it, I don't need it.". If you have some free-time and some flatmates to help you carry, furniture is free.
I found my room via a web-page with the address "flatmatefinders.com.au", other pages you can try are "flatmates.com.au" or "gumtree.com.au.". However, it's often the shadier rooms which are advertised on gumtree and demand is particularly high after housing on this page. No matter what page you're using my tip is to call the advertiser within 12 hours from that he/she posts the ad, if he/she hasn't stated that they prefer to be contacted in another way. It's often the one who are among the first five to call who ends up living in the place. See to it that you can come to a housing interview at the time which the advertiser prefers. Check out the place and especially check out the potential flatmates. Good flatmates is the alpha and omega for having a good experience on your exchange.

The project work is an absolutely vital part of the education on the biomedicine program. As you probably noticed, your education generally performs poorly when it comes to testing, encouraging or enabling creative problem solving or original application and design of method. The project work will be your only opportunity to develop and test these skills in yourself. That said I have to tell you that choosing a supervisor is like playing Russian roulette, especially if the lab you're going to is on another continent. This time I took the bullet.
The time-difference will make it hard to skype with a potential supervisor so everything you've got to judge their qualities on, is the way he/she formulates his/her emails to you and how quickly he/she responds to yours. Academics in Australia will often respond the following day. If the answers from your potential supervisor is often several days delayed you should be cautious. My advice is to not be afraid to judge and replace. No matter how interesting the offered projects are, it's your relation to the supervisor which is the most important factor in determining your success since he/she has so much power in this course. You have to go after the few impressions you get and it's you who get to suffer for months of your life if you make the wrong choice. In Australia most aspiring researchers will do an honours project after their bachelor exam. It's kind of like a Swedish fil. kand, you pay a lab to work for them for a year and get a degree from that. See to it that the supervisor knows that you're just and undergrad and only will be working at the lab for a semester. When my supervisor finally realised I was a mere bachelor student and would only work for him for a semester he lost most of what little interest he originally might have had for my project. His lack of involvement resulted in that I often had to wait hours or days in a row for help with things he could have guided me through on half an hour. I know a fair amount of course mates and also other academics who've had similar experiences with undedicated supervisors, which has made their experimental processes very inefficient. Of course you'll have to make up for the time which is lost in a later stage of the project.
I can't speak for lab culture in Australia at large but I can tell you that at my lab an autonomy was expected which I'd never experienced at KI. In principle I've planned and performed my project all by myself. Since my supervisor went away to a conference in USA for the last month of my stay in Australia, I also did the absolute majority of the results analysis and the discussion by myself, whit myself. In 'Straya everyone's a mate, you don't address your supervisor with titles and everyone is unofficially at the same level. I'd advice you to not forget that there might be underlying power hierarchys anyway. My supervisor was a little bit more mate than everyone else and if he wanted something changed in the design or application of method there was never really any discussion about that. He certainly didn't feel he needed to explain why he wanted the changes he wanted, at least not to me. The rest of the research group was relaxed and welcoming, I got a lot more help and support from the Ph. D students than from my supervisor. Most in the group were huge fans of Game-of-Thrones. We had heavy discussions about who would win in a fight between Brienne of Tarth and the Hound. One Ph. D student had the same favourite fantasy as me ("The Liveship Traders" trilogyI) and one read the same Sci-fi I read.

Even though my supervisors absence have delayed the completion of my project there it has not been entirely without benefits.  Even though I won't get a letter of recommendation from him, I've been forced to an autonomy which I think will serve me well in future Ph. D studies. A big difference between conducting research and taking courses is that in a course you constantly limit yourself to the curriculum, while if you're a good researcher you use the academic fields and methods which are best suitable to solve the problem at hand. This fact is very important to take to heart. I travelled to Australia with the ambition of using Neurology and Psychology to advance human knowledge of hallucinations and their neural correlates. What I ended up doing was programming in Matlab (to create test-programs displaying the right stimuli) and handling Excell (this to handle the great amount of data from my test-subjects), If you're going into research you can't limit yourself to the narrow field where your speciality lies if there's a better solution beyond this field. You've got to learn to apply this better solution because odds are that no one else is going to do it for you. At least not if you're a Ph.D student or Post-doc. Engineers and programmers are hired more than they are actually needed and they aren't cheap. What you know best after your time on KI is, after all, to learn new things.

The biggest reason speaking for my to return to Australia is the people. I felt more welcome and at home among Aussies than among Swedes. They're an open, relaxed and honest mix of different cultures. I've got a theory about why the infrastructure and city planning is so inferior in Sydney:

People are to busy chilling out and entertaining themselves to see to it that the country goes like a Swiss clock. This attitude makes all the shortcomings of the country forgiveable. I had zero culture crash.

The language is no problem at all, Sydney is characterized by a gnarly degenerated variant of cockney since the city has it's root as a British prison colony. I stopped noticing the dialect a couple of months into my stay. The exception from this are the Chinese suburbs like Burwood where there's a big language barrier. There it's sometimes hard to get around on English in stores or if you've lost your way. However, if you don't live close to Burwood there's not really any reason to travel there, it's one of those suburbs where nothing interesting happens. A fluency in mandarin is not a necessity in Sydney but a plus, every tenth inhabitant of the city is of Chinese origin. I believe most of the citys inhabitants are first, second or third generation immigrants. Beyond immigration from Great Britain and USA, asian and Indonesian immigration dominates. One of the consequences of this is an amazing food culture.

The alcohol culture in Australia is strong and generous. They're known for their binges where they pour cheap, poorly tasting, domestically produced beer down each others throats. At the club you don't buy drinks for yourself alone, instead you take turns to buy rounds for each other. You'll have to learn to say no to alcohol in a socially skilled manner or your head and liver will hurt. A paradox is that 8 beers within a couple of hours is ok, but you're considered an alcoholic if you have one shot of pure spirits. We export Swedish alcohol to the other side of the world! You can find among others "Rekordelig" and "Absolut" in every liquor store over there.

Australia is a very naked country, which is understandable on days where the temperature rest on 32 degrees Celsius. The summer-dress season last 8 months a year and it's not unusual for the clothes to come of entirely on wilder clubs and house-parties. Aussies aren't very prude. They also seem to lack most Swedish restraints and inhibitions, especially after those 8 beers. Finally I want to add that even though Australia has conservative LGTB laws Sydney is a very gay city. It's expressed in a very clear way by both genders, especially under the Mardi Gras festival (Their version of pride, which lasts for a month and starts sometime in February.). If you have those preferences you certainly won't be lonely.

I was never involved in the student life of UNSW, I met people in other ways. However I got an impression of a rich student life there. Under O-week (starting the 24th of February) all the numerous student societies makes themself visible and a number of introduction parties are held. I remember that there's one paint-ball society and one Iaido-society. After O-week it's at least one student party or event every week.

In stark contrast to Stockholm it's easy to talk to strangers on the streets of Sydney or in one of the numerous clubs and pubs. A tip for you who are new in town and want to meet interesting people:

Dress up in the strangest, most spectacular outfit you brought and get reasonable intoxicated in a Newtown bar of your choice (Lots of strange folks in Newtown). I didn't even have time to get on the bus before the obviously non-sober Breogham (who was dead serious of being an heir of William Wallace) grabbed hold of me to show me his home-made tech trance. We had a adventure together in and around Newtown and he invited me to an open-air drum-and-base party which was to be held in a park the following day. I went there and got introduced to the Australian electronic music scene. At this party I found a party-crew dressed in neon fur, with rainbow coloured hair and with their arms covered with rainbow coloured plastic bracelets. Candy-ravers. Jackpot. This particular groups thing was to always go out in sloppy plastic horse masks. Spectacular. These amazing entities became my new friends in town and they introduced me to many strange characters and intense adventures. As you've guessed by now, the city has an amazing night life. Electronic music such as drum-and-base, dubstep and trance dominates but there's something for all tastes, no matter how strange and deranged. What I wanted to say with this long paragraph is that there's an adventure-potential in Sydney which Stockholm is light-years from owing up to. For you of an open, tolerant and adventurous disposition this is the perfect playground.

Even though there's nowhere to live, even though the infrastructure in many aspects is at a technology level of the 70-ties and even though I slaved away like an animal 29 days of 30 during my stay in the country I want to go back. I'm now spending a year working up enough money to travel down-under and live there for at least a couple of months the summer of 2015. It's because of how amazingly easy it was to find adventures that 30th day every month. The day when I actually took the time to make the city my playground. It's the people and the adventure potential which is driving me on. I'm convinced I would have loved it in Sydney if I'd had a little bit more free-time. 4.5 months in one place is not enough to gather friends for life but I have met brothers- and sisters-to-be. The relations needs about 6 more months to grow.

I believe that the autonomy and the mindset about interdisciplinary solutions I've obtained during this project work has left me well prepared for future Ph. D. studies and a continued career as a researcher within neurology. The way to effective problem solving lies not in narrow-mindedly applying once own small field to every problem but in using the field and method most suitable to that problem. The most important result from this entire experience is that I've proven to myself that if you dump me in whatever English speaking country there is, with a small amount of money, I will within a month have fixed a bank account, an endogenous phone number and an exciting social life, South Africa next! Or maybe Canada?

I slaved away like an animal, sleep with the cockroaches, ate with insects and lived only an inch above a tramp on the social ladder but never has there been so easy to connect to strange and deranged people and find absurd amazing events! I do not regret going and I'm going back there again.