As I prepared to write this final reflection, I found myself looking through the application drafts I wrote to get into Laidlaw over two years ago, which honestly feels like a few lifetimes ago, back when I had just arrived in London and at LSE. What I have found is that, rather than a fundamental shift in my understanding of leadership, I have retained the deeply collaborative and relational view I held at 18. My understanding of leadership has been deepened and expanded through both my Leadership in Action project with the UNHCR in Guatemala and my team's research project on overtourism and short-term rentals in European cities.
That said, in some of the smaller nuances, my understanding has shifted in the wake of these real experiences with leadership. Previously, I placed significant weight on final decisions, which I imagined would always be made by a singular, consistent "leader." I now understand leadership not as a trait that can belong only to one person in a group, but as something more distributed and contextual, something that moves among team members depending on the moment and the task at hand. I also used to assume that leadership would be relatively smooth sailing once you got the hang of it. I've since learned that difficulty is not a sign of failure but an inherent part of the process. There will be difficult conversations and difficult tasks. But working through these bumpier moments and forging stronger bonds because of them ultimately makes you a better leader and creates a healthier, more productive group dynamic.
Effective shared leadership means allowing expertise, not hierarchy, to determine who leads in a given moment, allowing people to step up in their areas of expertise, and recognizing when a more traditional, top-down approach would hinder rather than advance the work. Our research group spanned anthropology, economics, international relations, history, and politics. It was genuinely illuminating to see how each discipline trained people to tackle problems differently, bringing unique frameworks to bear on our shared research questions. With my background in history, it was rewarding not only to learn new skills from other disciplines but also to apply historical methodologies and perspectives to present-day issues, enriching both the research project and my earlier work during the LiA placement.
Working across disciplines requires a kind of translation, learning to understand not just different vocabularies but also different standards of evidence and modes of argumentation. Those with backgrounds in economics, history, or anthropology might approach the same question about short-term rentals from entirely different angles: one quantifying the impacts on the housing market, the other examining how residents narrate displacement. Rather than seeing these as competing approaches, I learned to view them as complementary lenses that together produce a richer, more robust analysis than any single discipline could provide on its own.
This also required me to be willing to ask basic questions, admit gaps in my knowledge, and trust my teammates and their expertise. This was an aspect of leadership that, when I first joined Laidlaw, I struggled with, and to look back and realize how much I have developed in this area was heartening. The result was research that I could not have produced individually, and a sharper sense of how my own disciplinary training both enables and constrains the questions I think to ask.
Laidlaw has shaped both what I want to do and how I want to do it. In Guatemala, I worked closely with refugees and asylum seekers as they navigated displacement. During my research project, I examined housing crises and mobility justice. Engaging with these issues firsthand, rather than just studying them, confirmed my desire to continue this kind of work. As I look into master's degrees in international development or social policy, the skills I developed through the program, from qualitative research to cross-cultural communication, have come in useful and will continue to shape my path forward.