Background
Bachelor’s degree Anthropology with an extended minor in French from Simon Fraser Universtiy, Vancouver, Canada
On writing the master thesis
The process of deciding on a topic was difficult. There are so many interesting things that can be studied and so many fascinating places to go. In the end I decided to focus on vaccination due to some personal experiences that happened during my first semester at the University of Oslo. In November of last year, 2008, I lost a friend to a vaccine preventable disease. I decided I wanted to look into informed consent and information exchange in vaccination. I was offered a teaching position at a University in Bangladesh and in return they helped to facilitate my research. It was a win-win situation. Finding a supervisor was difficult as my topic is not that straight forward, but it was a great fit with the ethics department. It is really great to be doing a project with supervisors from two departments as I get different insight from each. I applied for some funding, but did not receive any, so the project has been completely self funded.
On the study environment
I have loved living in Norway. It is not that different to Canada. The student housing can be a bit rough at times but the university provides a great learning environment. The international setting provided at the University of Oslo is a bonus as you get to learn about so many more countries and gain knowledge from the variety of personal experiences of people in the class
Lessons learned
The most important thing I have learned from my masters so far is the process of how to do research and run a project. This can be applied to any future work I will do.
After graduation
Heather Ames completet her master thesis in 2011. she is currently working part-time in the Centre of Ethics at the University of Oslo.