I am just lucky that i live in vienna/austria, which has a pretty big biotech/pharma sector and very reputable faculties (even some key steps of how Crispr/CAS9 works were researched at the Vienna BioCenter, very awesome), so it isn't that hard in our country to find some place to get experience. But yeah, if these companies weren't here, the only real option is trying to get an internship at a research group, and most of those have other priorities than babysitting someone who only half-knows what's really going on because you are still missing key knowledge for such bleeding edge work and not the resources to spare someone for you to tag along with every day.

Our chemistry "Boot Camp" (and it really was one - the first real hurdle where a lot of students were sieved out) was the same course for the life-sciences. They had a different exam at the end AFAIK, but they had to deal with everything else just as we had to - tons of harshly graded work assignments every week (they really drove home how exact you have to be in this field, although their criteria were bullshit at some points; i got zero points for one portion of a work assignment because my lettering of the x-axis of a graph was not in the same style as the y-axis. seemingly swapping between cursive and normal lettering is an academic fault) and unannounced tests every few weeks, which were the main part of your grade.