My long journey to Australia...
I decided to go on exchange to perform my Master's thesis abroad, because I thought that it would be a nice opportunity to put in practice all the knowledge acquired during the first three semesters of the programme.
I knew that I wanted to go to Australia for two main reasons: the first one because I had not been in Australia before, and the second one because during the master's, a lot of the health economics evaluations that we studied were carried out in that country, and I wanted to perform my degree project in that field.
I however did not have in mind any particular university that I wanted to attend, as there are of course many good options to choose from. Thus, I decided that I was going to look first if there were any academic agreements with Karolinska and if there were, then I would look for a research group in Health Economics in that particular university. After doing that, I discovered that KI had an agreement with Griffith University, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, for Master's students in Public Health (that would be me). So I immediately started looking for health economics research groups at Griffith University.
To my greatest surprise, Griffith University was the hosting institution for the Centre for Applied Health Economics (CAHE), which performs many economic evaluations of a wide variety of health care programmes among Australia and particularly the state of Queensland. I took a look at their website, their publications, and their experts and I knew that it was the number one option to perform my Master's thesis. Hence, in February 2017 (that is one year before the thesis semester started), I wrote to the centre and externalised my interest in performing my Master's thesis over there (I of course wrote to several other institutions as well). I decided to write well in advance because I knew that performing a thesis abroad was not going to be an easy task, as there are several steps that must be accomplished before even thinking about going abroad. In summary these were (for me): deciding on a topic, finding a supervisor at KI that would be willing to work with you on that topic, find a supervisor abroad who would be willing to work with you on the topic (this was quite hard because, from the KI side, the university will help you finding a supervisor, however, the supervisor from the hosting institution will only be willing to work with you if your CV and experience are of their interest to invest their resources in you to go and work with them), find money to go there (KI's INK agreement [which was really of a lot of help] will support you with around 8,000 SEK, the plane ticket to Australia was around 8,500 SEK, the rest of the expenses were on me), apply to the hosting institution (letters, CV, english proficiency tests etc.), become accepted, apply for visa, continue deciding and detailing the thesis schedule and project while you do all the other formalities and finally you would have everything ready to go abroad and start working on your thesis!
With regards to the information that I received from KI, I have to say that the guidance that our university gives us is really good, as they clearly describe the process that you need to follow in order to go abroad and perform a Master's thesis. However, one thing is to state it, and other completely different one is going through it, as KI will help you as much as possible but pretty much all the process is on you with regards to writing to persons, applying to places and visas (and fulfilling the requirements), getting extra funds and so on, but it is definitely worth doing it, so do not get overwhelmed about all the things that you have to accomplish and just think that after that you will be studying in a nice warm place with beautiful beaches, Koalas and Kangaroos!