When I first began my Laidlaw journey, I thought good research was mostly about finding the right answer. If I could collect better data, choose the right model, and interpret the results carefully, I could understand a problem and perhaps even contribute to solving it. Over the course of the Scholarship, I have become much less certain that the path from evidence to action is that straightforward. I still believe deeply in the value of research. What has changed is my understanding of what comes after it.
My research initially focused on the economic effects of water scarcity in Türkiye. I approached the problem through the tools I knew best: data, economics, and quantitative analysis. I wanted to measure how water scarcity affected agricultural production and economic outcomes. That process taught me patience and intellectual humility. Real-world data is messy and usually not clean, assumptions matter, and sometimes the result you expect is simply not the result you find. Research forced me to become more comfortable with uncertainty rather than treating uncertainty as something that needed to be hidden.
During my Leadership-in-Action experience, that lesson expanded far beyond research methods. For example, one sentence I heard during the summer stayed with me: “Belki de meyvesi için çıkarttığın ağacı kerestesinden faydalanacaksın,” which translates to maybe the tree you planted for its fruit will end up being valuable for its wood instead.
It became a surprisingly accurate description of my own project. I entered with a carefully organized plan: review research, analyze water and agricultural data, and translate the findings into policy recommendations. What I encountered instead was a much wider world of engineers, agricultural specialists, remote-sensing researchers, and policy professionals who approached the same problem from very different directions. The project I had imagined changed; however, the value of the experience came precisely from allowing it to change. That required a different kind of character than simply completing what I had written in a proposal. I had to listen more than I expected to, ask questions without knowing where they would lead, and also become comfortable admitting when my original framework was incomplete.
I also began to understand leadership differently. Before Laidlaw, I often associated leadership with having the knowledge or confidence to make decisions. This summer showed me how often leadership instead means translating between people who understand different parts of a problem.
Water governance made this impossible to ignore. An engineer might think about groundwater levels or irrigation systems. An economist might think about incentives. A farmer may be thinking about whether a crop will support their family that year. A policymaker has to consider all of those perspectives while also thinking about institutions, political feasibility, environmental sustainability, and sometimes relationships with neighboring countries. None of these perspectives alone is sufficient.
One of the most important questions I encountered was deceptively simple: How do we treat something as an economic good when we also consider access to it a human right? I do not think there is a neat answer. That is partly the point. Ethical leadership is not always about discovering the technically optimal solution and implementing it. It requires asking who benefits, who bears the costs, whose knowledge is included, and what responsibilities extend beyond the immediate decision.
Water also changed what a “global mindset” means to me. Transboundary rivers made national borders feel unusually artificial. Water flowing through one country may determine agricultural production, ecosystems, or livelihoods in another. Satellites allow countries to observe resources beyond their own borders. Climate pressures developed in one place affect food systems and migration elsewhere. Even within one basin, decisions by one group can change the options available to another.
Then, being a global citizen cannot simply mean being interested in international issues or working across countries. For me, it now means recognizing that decisions made locally often have consequences that are not local at all.
Beyond Laidlaw, I want to carry that awareness into the kinds of problems I work on. My academic instincts will probably continue to push me toward numbers, models, and evidence. I do not want to lose that. But I want to become better at asking what the model leaves out, who is affected by the recommendation, and how evidence should be communicated responsibly when the answer is uncertain.
The biggest change Laidlaw has produced in me may therefore be a change in the question I ask. I began by asking, “What does the evidence tell us?” I now find myself asking another question immediately afterward: “And what are we responsible for doing with it?” That is the question I hope to carry with me long after the Laidlaw Scholarship ends.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Laidlaw Foundation, my Leadership-in-Action project advisor and the Georgetown University Laidlaw Scholars Programme for their guidance, support, and the opportunities they have provided throughout my Laidlaw experience.