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Electives

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The Electives account for 64 ECTS credits in the LAS Program. Academic advisors support students in making well-informed choices regarding their options; please also see the Study and Exam Regulations and the forms for credit recognition on ILIAS. The Electives allow students to supplement their Major, to shape their academic profile, and to deepen and / or broaden their studies in many different ways: 


Below, you can get an impression from Ivan's lab-based internship in Toulouse and have a look at the documentary that Charlotte and Rosa-Lena made on women in local politics. And we document the annual internships and practical projects event where students showcase and discuss their learning experiences:

Internship and practical projects in LAS – 2024 Event

After being forced to pause during the pandemic, the internship event was revived on February 2nd. Five LAS senior students were enthusiastic to share their experiences:

Lena Bindel (Governance) – no presentation, but lots of interesting experiences in HR with the US-American subsidiary of IKA Inc
Karla Karla Williams (Governance) – Internship at uniCross in Radio
Mara Mara Grabowski (Culture and History) – Internship in Decoration and Scenography at Sinny&Ooko in Paris (PDF, 12 MB)
Awa Awa Sow (Governance) – Internship at the West African Citizen Think Tank WATHI
Eva Eva Glock (ESS) – Internship at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar- and Marin-Research

Internship and practical projects in LAS – 2019 Event

The third event took place on February 6, 2019. For more information on the projects and internships please see the students presentations below.

Al Kanatri - Internship at DaMigra 2019

Kutayba Al Kanatri – Internship at DaMigra (PDF, 0.8 MB)

Ederer - Internship at BR 2019

Nora Ederer – What Constitutes Responsible Journalism? (PDF, 0.8 MB)

Mangels - Internship at BMWi 2019

Frederik Mangels – Internship at the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (PDF, 0.9 MB)

Internships and Practical Projects in LAS – 2018 Event

The second event took place on February 7, 2018. Please see the student presentations below for more information on their projects and internships. 

R. Wadenpohl – Internship at euro│topics R. Wadenpohl – Internship at euro│topics (PDF, 0.5 MB)
M. Chirikure – Centre for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research M. Chirikure – Centre for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research, Zimbabwe (PDF, 1 MB)
C. Giardi – Reopening Process GAMC C. Giardi – Reopening Process GAMC, San Marino (PDF, 1 MB)
M. Burtscher – Interning at the Austrian Parliament M. Burtscher – Interning at the Austrian Parliament (PDF, 0.6 MB)

 

 

Internships and Practical Projects in LAS – 2017 Event

On January 31, 2017, UCF hosted the first showcase event. LAS students presented their experiences in preparing, doing, and receiving ECTS for internship projects. For more information, please see the slides below:

UCF-Karch-Ecology-Agriculture-Indonesia J. Karch – Ecology & Agriculture in Indonesia (PDF, 3.1 MB)
UCF-Mueller-IGEPN-Ecuador A. V. Müller – Instituto Geofísico del Ecuador (PDF, 2.5 MB)
UCF-Hoermann-Schaetzle-Vineyard K. Hörmann – Schätzle Vineyard (PDF, 3.1 MB)
UCF-Hubmann-Theatre-Oppressed S. Hubmann – Theatre of the Oppressed (PDF, 1.5 MB)
UCF-Niethammer-CSDS-Vietnam J. Niethammer – Center for Sustainable Development Studies (PDF, 839 KB)

Ivan, Life Sciences Major – Internship Experience at University of Toulouse 2018

During their studies at UCF, Life Sciences students must complete the Lab Practice module. This module gives insights on practical aspects of research in natural sciences, students experience lab’s everyday life and get the idea of main approaches to experiment design, while participating in current research or conducting their own. In my case, I wanted this module to be tightly connected to my bachelor thesis, that is why I was very happy to be accepted to complete my lab practice at Prof. Dr. Andrew Straw lab at University of Freiburg.

The lab of Andrew Straw studies neural circuits and behavior. By developing advanced technical systems such as virtual reality arenas, they investigate the mechanistic basis of visual behaviors such as navigation in Drosophila. The main difficulty of such a research is that, in order to provide full experience of virtual environment one must put an animal into some closed geometry (sphere, bowl, cylinder) and project virtual world onto the walls of this geometry. Tricky part here is the distortion of output image according to the geometry of the arena, so that virtual environment looks unwarped on arbitrary surface. In order to achieve such an effect special custom written software tools are used. Currently members of Straw group use FreemoVR graphical engine based on Robotic Operating System and OpenSceneGraph with custom calibration programs and shaders. Even though such a setup successfully does the job, it is not user-friendly, quite complicated and sometimes short of additional functionality.

Internship in Toulouse Internship in Toulouse - Lab work Internship in Toulouse - Experiment

During my lab practice my main assignment was to investigate modern graphical engines, which are used for games development, as a substitution for current software. In theory Unity engine appeared to be very promising for our purpose, that is way we’ve decided to try implementing it within the framework of my bachelor thesis. As a result, we’ve achieved significant progress and were very close to get the system up and running, but unfortunately had no time. Imagine my surprise when I was invited to continue my work at University of Toulouse within CNRS. Dr. Antoine Wystrach and Dr. Sebastian Schwarz study ant’s navigation and were very interested in building a system similar to Dr. Straw's VR arena. I was very happy to continue working on Unity implementation and excited to build the whole system from scratch. After two wonderful months in Toulouse, I have solved all the fundamental software problems with Unity engine, we've built the VR arena; and the system, even though with some minor cosmetic issues to be solved, is ready to put ants into virtual world.

As a final word, I would like to say, that LAS gives us very broad range of knowledge and skills, which we can use in variety of different fields and research areas. Four years ago I could have never imagined that I'm will be working with Virtual Reality systems for animals, but I do now, and it's fantastic.