Learner Profile
Christoph Rehberger

HMX Course

Biochemistry

Christoph Rehberger’s consulting work in the health care industry is only the latest application of his longtime interest in medicine. HMX courses presented an opportunity to improve his understanding; Christoph shared his experience after completing the HMX Biochemistry course.

For me it was a two-fold decision. I’m a management consultant. We’re working with sectors within the health care industry, biopharma and so forth – so a basic understanding of how biomedical processes work is definitely useful in day-to-day conversations. Even though we’re focusing much more on the commercial side, in order to make that work, you need to have a basic understanding of how the science behind it works.

My second [motivation] was, a few years ago, before I started university, I already had the drive toward doing something in the medical space. The decision then was a very different one, but throughout the years I’ve kept in touch with the medical field, being a paramedic during my civil service in Germany, then during business studies I tried to do some health economics classes. I did a second masters in the biotech field and how it can commercialize. So for me it was always a wish to do more in that field.

I know what a cell is and the basic parts of a cell, but I’d never really looked into the biochemical processes – most of the things were completely new to me. I knew what activation energy is, for example. But I think the course did a great job of really focusing on the concepts of how cells work. And linking it back to clinical cases that might be linked to chemistry processes was great – I really enjoyed that.

I think the quiz questions after each video are extremely helpful – that’s exactly what you need if you have a course that’s run remotely, because it really engages you in thinking on your own and thinking about the topic itself.

I remember specifically the [lesson] where there was a disease outbreak in Haiti, and [we were asked], what do you think could cause that? So you had a free text field where you wrote down your own thoughts. That for me was fantastic because you really could check if you’re on the right track, if you’re thinking about the right things. Whereas after the smaller videos explaining the concepts, it was much more focused on the details, do you really understand the concepts. There was a nice differentiation between levels of understanding that were easy to follow. You think about the problem at a high level, you get more information about it and now let’s see if you really understood it. I thought that was a nice thread throughout the course to help with understanding what is expected of you to really grasp the concepts.

I’m super excited about it, actually. A big part is, you really focus on the key concepts without a lot of details. I went away feeling like I actually understand now how the basic chemical processes work in the cell – and hence I got more excited about the field itself.

I’m actually quite surprised you can break down the concepts into such small videos. I think it was almost genius at some times. Thinking about the small concept videos where you have analogies… animating those, and then coming back to how a cell works, and then linking back to the clinical part. That was very, very well thought through.

I also talked to a colleague that took the course as well – he had similar experiences, so we were both quite happy about deciding to do the courses.