Name: Shanti Bolt
Age: 26 years
PBH cohort: 2019-2021
Bachelor’s program: Biomedical Sciences, Leiden University
2nd master’s program: Forensic Science, University of Amsterdam
Current job/position: advisor at the Centre for Ethics and Health
But WHY: Why did you choose to follow Philosophy: Bioethics and Health at the VU? How do you look back at your studying time there?
I choose to study PBH because I got inspired by a philosophy of science course during my bachelor programme. In biomedical sciences you need to specialize in a particular disease, therapy, protein or gene on a very detailed level. Moreover, biomedical research may take decades before it produces an innovation that contributes in clinical practice to what I was doing it all for: helping patients. Along the way of my bachelor’s, I found out that studying a more broad overview of science was more interesting to me: what are we doing all of this research for and does it in the end actually contribute to something good for actual persons, the end-users of the knowledge produced? I am a result-driven kind of person: for me to keep motivated, I need to see what the rewarding upshot of scientific research in practice is. This is how I ended up combining Forensic Science and PBH. Forensic Science is a more applied specialisation of Biomedical Science with relatively short-term results in interdisciplinary project-based working, with very concrete beneficiaries in the judicial system: victims of criminal offenses and their loved ones, and suspects of criminal offenses with a right to a fair trial. PBH provided me with the reflection on science that I missed during my bachelor’s and it has been an amazingly enriching addition to my education. I felt in advance that doing two master programmes could become a bit much, so I decided to just start on both and see whether I liked it, without pressuring myself in any way to finish both – although eventually, I did end up finishing both.
Pros and cons: What did you like the most about the Philosophy: Bioethics and Health program? And did you encounter any struggles?
I liked the dedication and yet easy-goingness of teachers. The programme coordinators and teachers are aware that students are combining two master programmes, so they are flexible with deadlines and pragmatic in their approach. In my experience, they are willing to make arrangements with individual students to fit the PBH activities well with their other master’s schedule. Moreover, the PBH cohorts aren’t (that) large, so teachers know their students by name and pay personal attention to their development, which I really appreciated. Content-wise I enjoyed most courses, but there are some highly theoretical courses that I did not like. I found it hard to connect the abstract philosophical theory of those courses to scientific practice. Especially if I had to read entire books of abstract and non-modern philosophers, I sometimes got a bit lost in the material. However, there are more applied/bioethical courses in the PBH programme, so for me the balance between pros and cons of PBH leans definitely heavy towards the pros side.
