23 Jan 2025
At the age of 13, Simon Schreiner fell seriously ill. Kinderkrebshilfe, a charitable organization that supports young cancer victims, helped him and his family. Now, the statistics student is himself committed to this same group.
Simon Schreiner supports children with cancer and young refugees. | © LMU/Jan Greune
Since 2020, LMU statistics student Simon Schreiner has, alongside his studies, been doing voluntary work for Germany’s Kinderkrebshilfe in Cham. It is a small organization that provides financial and self-help assistance to the families of children and youngsters who have cancer. “Parents in this kind of situation often cannot go out to work,” the 21-year-old explains. Even just having to drive their children to treatment sessions two or three times a week is hard enough. The organization’s financial assistance naturally does not come near to covering all the extra expenditure. That is why Simon seeks also to provide psychological support to the parents.
The organization regularly takes care of arranging self-help groups. These do not involve sitting around in a circle and talking about problems: Rather, they are times to play, make things and, wherever possible, to satisfy the desires of each child’s heart. “The parents also get to talk to each other and spend time together,” Simon explains. The aim is to take the children’s mind off things and give the parents moments of respite. “After all, this time of suffering is a huge challenge for the whole family until the children are well again.”
Simon’s dedication to this cause is no coincidence. Eight years ago, he himself was diagnosed with cancer. Back then, the Kinderkrebshilfe in Cham helped him and his parents to stay as mentally balanced as possible until Simon fully recovered. Now, the young man sees his commitment as a way to give something back. “Apart from which, older children can be really encouraged by an adult who has himself been through what they are experiencing,” he says. His youthfulness also helps them to bond with him. “And it naturally feels good to be able to help a little bit.”
In the wake of his illness, it was by no means certain that Simon would be able to go on and study at LMU. Because of his cancer treatment, he wasn’t able to go to school at all in the eighth grade. When he started feeling a bit better, at least teachers for German, math, French and Latin came to visit him, although he received no tuition in subsidiary subjects. He began ninth grade on a trial basis and was fortunately just about able to scrape through. Keen to be the first person in his family to go to university, however, he soon caught the ambition bug. By the time he was in eleventh grade, his grades were getting better and better.
Today, Simon is studying statistics and data science at LMU. To put it simply, his focus is on using data to make predictions and being able to capture uncertainties in the data in the form of metrics. Since he began his course, he has often been asked what the point of studying this subject is. However, since the advent of artificial intelligence in general and ChatGPT in particular, people’s understanding has been growing. The 21-year-old simply explains that you could never program this kind of routine without statistics. Data analytics is a hugely important topic in business, too.
Since Simon regularly completes internships during vacations, he has, regrettably, had to significantly scale back his commitment to the voluntary fire service in Cham. Even in Munich, though, he always finds ways to get involved. One example is with the social agency Condrobs, which was looking for German teachers to provide intercultural homework supervision for young refugees. “That brought me into contact with lots of young people from all kinds of different countries,” he says with a smile, although he admits that their life stories were often less pleasing.
The Deutschlandstipendium (Germany Scholarship) helps Simon to keep looking after young cancer-sufferers in Cham alongside his studies. He wants to be independent of his parents and would otherwise have to get another part-time job. The damage to his leg bones still imposes some restrictions on him to this day. But he refuses to rest on the scholarship award, preferring instead to top up his income with jobs as a working student. For now, however, he has to complete his bachelor’s degree before moving on to his master’s course. As long as he doesn’t one day move to Mexico, he promises that he will continue to make regular visits to Cham.