SUMMARY
Today nursing is an academic discipline. Nursing education today has to prepare nursing students to be professional practitioners who can seek and utilize academic knowledge to continuously develop their nursing practice. Also, nurses today must have competencies to participate in research projects. It is known that engaging nursing students in clinical projects, enhances their understanding of the use of research knowledge and the importance of continuously developing their nursing practice. Therefore, we developed a concept, called combined M13+14 course, where nursing students in their bachelors thesis, worked closely with a clinical department on a project identified and described in close collaboration with clinical partners. This paper reports nursing students’ motivation for and experiences of participating in the M13+14 course. 34 nursing students filled out a questionnaire, and five purposely selected students each participated in 2 interviews. The findings revealed the primary motivation for engaging in the M13+14 course, to be the possibility to work with a project that had a significant meaning for clinical practice. The students experienced working in a triadic collaboration on the projects and what they learned during this work gave them academics insights they used in their daily clinical work as a nurse after graduation.