Last weeks of July, various research groups of the VHIR have welcomed two students who have received the Extraordinary High School Award, to assist professionals from different lines of research and observe, first hand, the day-to-day activity in a research lab.The winning students, Monica Torrecilla and Claudia Castelló, have made a stay in the research groups of http://en.vhir.org/portal1/grup-equip.asp?s=recerca&contentid=186821 Ophthalmology and http://en.vhir.org/portal1/grup-equip.asp?t=cibbim-nanomedicina-direccionament-i-alliberament-farmacologic&s=recerca&contentid=186781 the CIBBIM-Drug Delivery and Targeting respectively. Both groups have shown to the students the reality of the research and collaboration between hospital departments and the usefulness of the basic research and follow-up methods that they have begun to practice in the university. "I think it's very interesting because in college you never know where you'll end up. I had not seen the real usefulness of techniques such as PCR, or the animal tract in the animal research facility," says Mónica Torrecilla, a first-year student of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Barcelona, and who has been received at the Ophthalmology group by the researchers Anna Badia and Anna Salas.For Claudia Castelló, a first-year student of Medicine, the practices in the group CIBBIM-Drug Delivery and Targeting, supervised by Fernanda Andrade, have allowed her to discover nanomedicine, a specialty that she completely ignored. "I have seen some of the applications of nanoparticles in medicine, such as allowing us to send a drug in a very localized way and also with less toxicity."For both students, the stay has been a unique opportunity to learn about the research world and to work with scientists' hand-by-hand. The Extraordinary High School Award, created in 1999, not only represent the official recognition of the merits of the students, but to encourage students, who just are starting to decide how to orientate their professional future.