FEATURE Professor Lau’s vision starts with education: ‘Training the next generation of doctors, nurses, Chinese medicine practitioners, pharmacists and researchers, whether in the lab or looking at global health, has been and remains our number one priority,’ he said. It is a goal close to his heart. As a secondary school student, Professor Lau considered going into teaching. He has long enjoyed spending time with students, even joining them on runs to the Pokfulam Reservoir, and previously served as Assistant Dean in Education and Student Affairs, and Associate Dean in Teaching and Learning at HKUMed. He has also kept the memories of his own years as a medical student fresh in mind, recalling the highs but particularly the lows: every time one door shut, he held his nerve and persevered, and another door would open. The lessons learned have informed his empathy with students. ‘You might actually encounter times when you feel a bit disappointed, times when you feel a little bit of a failure,’ he told this year’s MBBS class on their first day. ‘What I would like to say to you, is that this is really part of the growth as a medical student and eventually, of course, as a doctor.’ Professor Lau’s own start on the road to academia started with tentative steps. Upon completing secondary school in Hong Kong, he was uncertain about what to do next. His sister had just gone to the UK to study, so he decided to follow her and studied A-levels at Newcastle College of Arts and Technology in 1978. Many of his Perseverance pays off classmates were punk rockers and not very interested in studying, but he knuckled down and worked hard. To his surprise, he became the top student in his class. ‘All of a sudden, I felt I was not too bad, that I could excel. And that was when I started thinking seriously about entering university,’ he said. Unlike schools today, there were no career or higher education advisors so he had to plan his next stage by himself. He considered engineering and dentistry, but ultimately decided medicine held the most promise. However, there was no straight line to his ambitions. The University of Dundee invited him for a tour of the campus, but it turned out there had been a mistake – when he arrived, his name was not on the list of potential students. ‘This was my darkest hour,’ he said. The university let him join the tour anyway and he kept his wits about him, clearly making an impression – within a few weeks, he was offered a place to study medicine there. ‘By this point, I yearned to be a doctor. Everybody looked up to doctors. I was very happy to be invited,’ he said. That marked the start of his very fruitful career. ↑Having served HKUMed for almost 30 years, Professor Lau had been Assistant Dean in Education and Student Affairs, and Associate Dean in Teaching and Learning. 劉教授服 務港大醫學院近三十 年，曾任醫學院助理 院長（教育及學生事 務）及副院長（教學）。 ‘Training the next generation of doctors, nurses, Chinese medicine practitioners, pharmacists and researchers, whether in the lab or looking at global health, has been and remains our number one priority.’ 6
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