Wei Chin, a maths student from Magdalene College, discusses her volunteer work for Food Angel, Hong Kong
I was born and raised in Hong Kong, and lived there until the age of 13
I then moved to a school in the UK, and have stayed ever since. Despite this, I still have many friends and family in Hong Kong and I go back regularly to visit.
Last summer, I was invited by a friend to join her for some volunteering sessions at Food Angel, a local charity set up to provide free hot meals for the underprivileged communities
Edible surplus food is sourced from restaurants and supermarkets all around Hong Kong and brought to a main kitchen for processing. Here, my role was to sort through the vegetables and chop them up. On other occasions, I would work on the other end of the production line by boxing up the food. Upon chatting to fellow volunteers, I learned that the elderly were the most common beneficiaries of these meals as many of them live alone and would otherwise be living off pot noodles and other less nutritious foods.
Although the work mainly involved simple tasks, one still feels a sense of achievement from the experience
Not only do you help save a lot of food from going to waste, but you also find yourself possibly making somebody’s day just that little bit better by giving them a delicious hot meal to look forward to.
At the moment I am still uncertain as to the direction I would like to take my career
A job in the city would seem to be the most natural given my mathematical background, however I definitely would not rule out careers in other areas such as the betting and gaming industry, which is somewhere I find to be very interesting and exciting. However there do not seem to be as many opportunities in this sector as others, so I may have to explore other options before revisiting this area.
This summer I’m completing an actuarial internship at Willis Towers Watson
This will be my first ‘proper’ job and I hope to learn a lot from this experience, as it would give me an idea on what a city job entails and the lifestyle that comes with it. From there, I will hopefully gain a better understanding of where I would like to be in my career.
The Careers Service has really opened my mind to the multitude of opportunities out there after university
The most useful events are definitely the various careers fairs, as I find it very helpful speaking to representatives of their respective companies, understanding what it is they do and even learning about how they came to the decision regarding their own careers. The sessions on specific career areas (e.g. the civil service talk) also spring to mind as being helpful, as the speakers are often very experienced in the application processes and have answers for almost all questions!