A group of 17 Surrey students from a range of academic disciplines spent four weeks this summer volunteering across a wide range of local projects in the tropical climes of Sri Lanka.
Planned for Surrey by staff from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences together with Student Enterprise and hosted by responsible travel organisation Travelteer, the programme allowed students to split their time between a number of meaningful social and environmental impact activities in the Hikkaduwa area of South West Sri Lanka over the month of July.
Having been curated by Travelteer with input from Surrey staff, the People & Planet volunteering project appealed largely but not exclusively to students from FHMS. It offered aspiring medics, scientists and vets a perfect opportunity to gain global experience within clinical, education and conservation settings in a developing nation.
In the final week of their month-long programme, students were joined by the winners of the Surrey 2024 hackathon, as well as students from another UK University who were volunteering in the same area, and Sri Lankan students from Vavuniya University. They all took part in an Empathy Hackathon delivered by Shelini Surendran and Kat Mack who run the award-winning University’s annual sustainability hackathon.
The aim of the Empathy Hackathon was to deliver an entrepreneurial activity where problem statements specific to Sri Lanka were presented to the students in teams. Running a hackathon whilst students were immersed in the relevant cultural and physical environment of rural Sri Lanka allowed those without any entrepreneurial or business skills to better understand the underlying concepts through living and volunteering within the communities to which the problem statements related.
Student teams tackled challenges such as higher education for underprivileged children, turtle habitat conservation and women’s economic empowerment. Teams were mentored by six graduate engineers from the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka who were keen to support the hackathon and its social goals.
Kat Mack, who also teaches on the Global Graduate Award in Entrepreneurship, said: “It has been our ambition to ensure that after our University sustainability hackathons, the impact is continued beyond and skills applied to the wider world. It has been wonderful to plan and deliver an incredibly meaningful hackathon out in Sri Lanka, taking students into the projects where their ideas would apply.
Students had already spent three weeks absorbing the very different culture and way of living in areas of Sri Lanka that contrast starkly with what we are used to in the UK, particularly in terms of the standard of social and medical care we are privileged to have here. I believe the practical learning experiences these students have had will shape them and set them apart as more worldly, more compassionate and ultimately more employable leaders of the future, aligning with the University’s Student Employability Strategy.”
Shelini Surendran, Associate Dean International for FHMS, said: “The overall volunteering experience offers profound benefits. Learning outside the classroom builds skills of empathy, resilience, and global awareness, which are difficult to develop through traditional methods alone. I encourage other staff to create similar programs that enhance the student experience and contribute to their personal and professional development”.
Foundation year Psychology student Xav Wade took part in the full experience in Sri Lanka. He said, “I had plans to travel during my gap year but that unfortunately could not go ahead, so when the opportunity came along to spend a month in Sri Lanka (the country my mother is from) with fellow students of my university, I felt I could not pass that up. Something that stood out to me was the Empathy Hackathon that Surrey hosted during our last week. The process of reading and understanding the issues at hand in the local community followed by getting hands on and making visits to understand the problems better really helped to enhance the learning experience in a different country and provided that much more motivation to make a difference. Having completed the trip I feel I got so much out of it for both personal reasons as well as life long friends and memories!”
Find out more about joining a student volunteering programme or how you can get support or work with existing projects around women’s economic empowerment, children’s education or turtle and beach conservation.
Students can sign up for more information about the People and Planet volunteering opportunity June-July 2025.
