The medical curriculum holds that it is mandatory for the students to write a pre master’s thesis. In 2015, altogether 124 pre master’s theses were completed. Of these, 105 were written with supervision from researchers affiliated to K1 or K2. K2 contributed with 51 and K1 with 54 of the pre master’s theses. This says that students choose tasks that are clinically related. For K1 and K2 this implies opportunities for recruitment to subsequent research and also to the specific clinical fields of medicine. There are several examples that the recruitment into research has gone through a pre master’s thesis. One gets the chance to evaluate whether this is a student with both the skills and the ambitions to do research. At the same time, post-docs and experienced PhD-fellows may have an opportunity to try their hands as supervisors.

In the new medical curriculum the pre master’s thesis will play a bigger role than in the old. The research groups that do not have a strategy to use the students and the resource they represent through pre master’s thesis, should consider this. Here lie possibilities that the research groups should exploit.

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