JMSC Students Win Praise for Their Coverage of a Child Safety Medical Conference

A JMSC student team assigned to cover a recent conference arranged by the medical faculty’s Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine impressed the organisers with their professionalism.

Sophia Xu (MJ 2012) and Nancy Dai (MJ 2012) report in real time

The six, chosen from JMSC Associate Professor Thomas Abraham‘s  Reporting Health and Medicine class, comprised Nancy Dai Yue, Sophia Xu, Emma Jia, Nicky Ng, Qian Xu and Shirley Yan.

Topics of discussion at the Hong Kong Child Safety Conference on February 11 ranged from violence and bullying, alcohol and substance abuse, cyber bullying, suicide, traffic injuries, domestic injuries and sports injuries.

Xu said it was a good opportunity to hone her reporting on deadline.

“We had to finish the story half an hour after the session — so it was really newsroom-style speed and I gained a lot confidence from this challenge,” she said.

Dai also found the experience valuable. “Journalism is always about simplifying complicated ideas and telling them to the audience in an effective way,” Dai said.

“I had to constantly keep up with the speakers, extract the main points from their speeches and write the ideas in a simple but precise way so that people who were not present at my session could understand them in a short time. That was useful to me as a journalist.”

The JMSC’s research assistant professor Fu King Wa participated in the cyber bullying session.

“This was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that our curriculum has been well incorporated into the mode of ‘experiential learning’ which will be a fundamental element of the upcoming four-year HKU undergraduate curriculum,” he said.

Conference co-chairmen, Professor Lau Yu-lung and Dr Chow Chun-bong, said the students, “played a significant role as reporters of various parallel sessions in this conference.”