When Caring for the Lives of Others Transforms Your Own

Sports and science have always been a part of life for Simran Narwani, who was awarded the C.I. Stapleton Scholarship on joining HKU to pursue a Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences (BBMS) degree.

“When considering my options for university, I was limited by financial reasons to local ones in Hong Kong,” Simran recalls. “However, HKU had always been my first choice from the get-go. It was one of the only universities that had the programme I was the most interested in, the BBMS.”

As a child, she loved watching YouTube videos of science experiments. “It got to a point where I used to try to remake the videos and experiments from household materials, and film myself too. I would get my parents involved as well by making them help me get the materials I needed,” she laughs.

For one of her final projects in high school, Simran did a personal biological experiment related to her culture, investigating ‘home remedies’ for helping digestion. “I loved the process because it was so personal, and this is what led me to pick BBMS as a major,” she says.

The other major contributing factor for choosing HKU was its flexible curriculum structure. “I’ve always taken up various interests simultaneously, whether they were hobbies, sports, or academic subjects,” she notes. However, her last few years of high school were stifled because of the pandemic, which prevented her from getting out and trying new learning experiences. “That’s why HKU’s flexible curriculum structure was so important to me and drew me in. It allowed me to explore science in conjunction with other disciplines, giving me a sense of freedom and enabling a holistic learning approach.”

HKU’s flexible curriculum structure allowed her to develop a new area of interest in sociology, which she ended up selecting as a second major. “I knew nothing about sociology when I started university and wasn’t really interested,” she recalls. “But I was exposed to it, encouraged to explore it, and supported along the way by my tutors and professors. This combination of biology and sociology opened up for me a new way of thinking on both an individual and a societal level – a perspective I would have not obtained with only the BBMS.”

This fresh outlook led her to the world of the HKU Cares Community Programme, where student sports-ambassadors provide care to elderly individuals in the local community through personalised exercise sessions, including resistance training, preventative rehabilitation, and physical fitness. The aim is to promote a holistic approach to healthy ageing, personal wellness, care for the community, and fun for the elderly population.

“When I learnt about HKU Cares, I immediately knew I wanted to sign up,” she says. “It was quite strange, felt like the opportunity was tailored just for me! It was a bridging of health and sports – my academic interests and my hobby – with a meaningful and fulfilling aspect of volunteering.”

As the programme is intended to help elderly individuals through resistance training, prevention exercises, and rehabilitative activities, Simran felt her own personal experience would be very relevant and applicable. “I’ve been playing competitive sports for years and have had injuries of my own, some of which have healed, whereas others continue to cause chronic pain. I’ve been doing rehabilitative and preventative exercises for the past two years, and continue to cope with it today,” she says. “So I felt like I could offer not only a supportive perspective, but also an empathetic one. I know what it’s like to be in pain, and to have to put in mental and physical effort despite that pain to get better.”

She remembers her first day of volunteering as being challenging but deeply encouraging too. “It was difficult at first. I am not extremely fluent in Cantonese and was assigned to help two elderly ladies, one a grandmother and the other, a retired teacher.” In spite of her ‘broken’ Cantonese, they worked through the session on the ladies’ ailments, communicating largely through actions. “It was only at the end of the session that I discovered one of them used to be an English teacher, and we had a good laugh about my attempts to communicate!” she says. “After that first time, every subsequent session I’d always look forward to seeing them, and they’d feel the same way too.”

Over time, Simran realised that the programme benefits were reciprocal, and that she was getting as much out of the volunteering as the ostensible recipients. By seeing the impact her experience and learning could bring to real people has led her to re-evaluate her academic direction. “After much consultation with my professors, I decided to raise my sociology minor to a second major, and to take this opportunity to apply to various internships that are related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in line with the Social Sciences Internship Scheme at HKU,” she notes.

“I have a broad idea of where I want to be involved, and that is either within biomedicine, sociology, or a bridge between the two disciplines,” she says, adding, “But I know I want to be involved in something hands on, and where I can make a direct impact on the community around me. So, clichéd as it may sound, my bottom line is that I want to help others, make others feel happy, and feel happy myself in the process. And until I find what it is I truly want to do, I will keep exploring, learning, and enjoying the journey.”