“In high school everyone knew what they wanted to do, but not me.”
That uncertainty is something Zainab Saeed returns to often when she talks about her undergraduate pathway toward the Integrated Rehabilitation and Humanities (IRH) program. While she felt like many of her classmates arrived at McMaster University with firm plans for their futures, she was still searching for a purpose and a sense of community.
That clarity came unexpectedly.
In first year, while selecting courses online, a program description “just popped up,” she says. IRH, which blends health sciences and the humanities, looked nothing like the traditional routes to medical school she had been considering. It was small, intimate, interdisciplinary, and, as she describes it, “so different in the best way.”
“You get a health science degree, but it’s not just science. It’s art, reflection, creativity — things we forget are essential in health care.”
Saeed joined the very first IRH cohort, grateful and a little surprised to have stumbled onto what felt like exactly the environment she had been missing: supportive, close-knit, and deeply human-centred. It’s a program that invites students not just to study illness, but to study the stories and humanity of the patients.
The first flicker of the Little Light Project
The origins of the Little Light Project (LLP), the student-led initiative Saeed co-founded, began not with strategy, but with laughter – in a chemistry lab. She and her lab partner, Simrat, were the only two students chuckling while waiting for a chemical reaction to appear.
“We were waiting for the titration point and we never really knew what was going on,” she says. “We still got the marks, but we were genuinely just having fun.” During one of those lab sessions, Simrat joked that they should start a club. Saeed brushed it off, assuming every club already existed, but the idea lingered.
That summer, they revisited it. “I just started wondering if so many student groups focus on supporting the biggest, best-known children’s hospitals, who is supporting the smaller community hospitals that don’t receive the same spotlight?”
Saeed connected with St. Joseph’s Health Centre (St. Joe’s) in Toronto, where Foundation staff enthusiastically accepted the support. They explained pediatric patients, seniors, and families have needs that are real, persistent, and sometimes invisible.
Healing the body and the soul
Unlike many health-related clubs, LLP doesn’t focus on medical volunteering or academic support. Their mission is emotional care — to dismantle the idea that hospitals are scary places for kids, and to remind students that creativity is a form of caregiving too.
Zainab Saeed delivers “WonderPacks” to St. Joseph’s Health Centre.
Because while clinicians treat illness, Saeed says, “their job is to deliver care — not necessarily to make the space feel less frightening.” That’s where LLP steps in, she says. LLP members illustrate stickers, handwritten cards and colouring booklet, and then assemble “WonderPacks” filled the items, which Saeed currently drives to the Toronto-based hospital to deliver.
The items, simple as they are, have been a hit. Staff tell Saeed that the kids love them, especially when parents can’t stay long, and something to hold, colour, or read helps pass the time with a bit more comfort.
But LLP does something equally powerful for the McMaster students who participate. The act of illustrating, crafting, or writing becomes restorative. A reminder that care isn’t only clinical, that humanities matter and that art can be an antidote to burnout.
“The culture for students with ambitions to go to medical school can be so competitive and intense,” she says. “Sometimes we just need a break – to breathe, to create, to feel like people again.”
In this way, LLP mirrors the very foundation of the IRH program: healing is not solely physical. It is emotional, relational, and profoundly human.
“Zainab is an example of the exceptional students we have in our Integrated Rehabilitation and Humanities program – thoughtful, caring, and curious – all key ingredients for the next generation of health-related professionals,” says Professor Brenda Vrkljan, director of the IRH program.
The growth of LLP and what’s to come
When Saeed started LLP, she imagined a small group — “close-knit, just a few of us.” But as needs grew, so did the team.
Today, they have illustrators, social media leads, operations coordinators, fundraisers, and students eager to help however they can. The group’s Instagram following quickly passed 1,300. In their first year, they delivered 50 WonderPacks, raised $300 for the NICU, and made many new connections, including across campus.
“The team has become so important to me,” she says. “I truly couldn’t have done this without them, and their support has been invaluable.” Their next goal is to fundraise to create kits full of essential items for parents whose newborns are in the NICU.
“Our main focus is really to help the kids, but we know that parents could use things like socks and chargers, and that’s how we want to help next.”
Long-term, Saeed hopes to study medicine, with an eye on surgery – likely cardiac, possibly neurosurgery, though she laughs that pediatrics keeps sneaking into her orbit no matter how much she resists predicting her path.
“I know I want a career with constant motion.”
Whether she becomes a surgeon, a pediatric specialist, or something she hasn’t yet imagined, LLP has already shaped her understanding of care in ways a textbook can’t. Delivering donations, meeting hospital teams, seeing the impact firsthand – that’s the light that seems to be leading her exactly where she’s meant to go.
Learn more about the IRH program.