Being selected as one of 25 undergraduates for the LSE Laidlaw Scholarship was a life-changing moment. When I opened the acceptance email, I felt both pride and pressure. This wasn't just an opportunity; it was a mandate to grow, to challenge myself, to become the kind of leader I hadn't yet imagined I could be.
The journey began in workshop rooms filled with strangers who would become the closest team I had worked with. The early Laidlaw sessions on ethical leadership and project management threw me into conversations with peers I wouldn’t have encountered at LSE otherwise, through full-day workshops held regularly across my first two years on the programme. Debating what accountability and time management mean in practice across disciplines taught me that leadership develops through intercultural dialogue. The workshops on project management gave me methods and introduced me to qualitative coding techniques that became essential not just during the project, but in other aspects of my leadership journey. They instilled in me a culture of sharing challenges and treating setbacks as learning opportunities, creating a discipline grounded in reflection, enhancement, and teamwork.
Having learned through this journey, I was ready for the Leadership in Action application process. Researching organisations, identifying the right institutional fit, and preparing written applications and interviews required me to clarify my values, refine my goals, and translate abstract interests into a concrete project proposal. Crafting my application to Smart Works forced me to articulate not just what I wanted to do, but why it mattered and what kind of impact I hoped to make. When I received confirmation that Smart Works had accepted me, it marked a clear shift in my journey towards working on gendered migration governance.
Walking into Smart Works for the first time, I entered a world where leadership meant impact, collaboration, and commitment to a shared purpose. I sat across from a Pakistani physiotherapist whose UK employers refused to recognize her qualifications, helping her articulate her expertise in ways the British job market would value, then watching her secure an interview on her own terms. These individual coaching sessions revealed a broader pattern, our traditional outreach methods were missing entire communities of women who needed support. As a South Asian national, I wanted to target a demographic that hadn't been addressed in Smart Works' outreach strategy. Discovering these gaps created an opportunity for real leadership.
I initiated and negotiated a partnership with ISR Leadership to build more resilient connections within the South Asian diaspora community. I designed and deployed an evidence-based outreach strategy that placed information stalls at 10 job fairs across London, ultimately registering 50% of attendees for our services. The scale grew when we coordinated with the Department for Work and Pensions, managing logistics for 600+ attendees. This taught me to hold operational detail and human connection in project management simultaneously.
Returning from Smart Works to Laidlaw sessions, I found I was processing the experience differently than I would have before the workshops. The discussions about positionality helped me understand that coordinating a job fair wasn't just logistics, it was questioning whose needs shaped service delivery, whose voices designed interventions, and whose metrics defined success. Using these learnings, I continued to volunteer with Smart Works on various projects even afterwards, and leadership was starting to mean something more complex than I'd understood at the beginning.
The annual Laidlaw Scholars Leeds conference tested whether I could translate this practical experience into a presentation attuned to students from different universities with varied backgrounds, experiences, and sensitivities. I made deliberate choices about language and tone to ensure the discussion was inclusive and respectful while remaining rigorous and impactful, honouring the work that had taken place to support those women. Questions from the audience pushed me to articulate not only what we did, but why our approach mattered, how evidence-based strategy used empathy to address systemic gaps and make an impact on migrant women who had been sidelined in UK decision-making processes.
Alongside this, the LSE Laidlaw Scholarship placed me on the Oxford Ethical Leadership Programme at the University of Oxford, delivered by the Oxford Character Project. The year-long programme culminated in my graduating with distinction following a final assessment. Under the guidance of Dr. Corey Crossan, the programme required sustained engagement through daily ethical reflection exercises, structured journals, weekly assessments, and monthly training sessions. Rather than approaching ethics abstractly, it demanded that we practise ethical leadership in real time, examining power, responsibility, and decision-making in our own lives and work. This discipline reshaped how I approached leadership, pushing me to slow down, interrogate my assumptions, and remain accountable to those most affected by my decisions. Collaborating with Laidlaw scholars globally across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe transformed ethics from a conceptual framework into a lived practice that now underpins how I lead, research, and engage with communities.
Through Laidlaw, I was also selected for an AI Governance Fast Track programme, chosen as one of 20 participants from over 300 applicants across universities. The programme introduced me to debates on the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary governance, social policy, and public service delivery, with a strong focus on ethical risk, accountability, and regulation. Engaging with case studies on healthcare and public administration culminated in my writing a policy memo on the integration of AI into NHS services, particularly the use of automated systems and chatbots in healthcare access. This experience sharpened my understanding of how emerging technologies intersect with inequality, public trust, and institutional responsibility, and reinforced my interest in governance that is both innovative and ethical.
Continuing to work within the LSE Laidlaw Scholarship through research design sessions, I then attended the conference at Cumberland Lodge, where the LSE Laidlaw community gathered for intensive interdisciplinary exchange to prepare for six weeks of primary research in Europe. Discussing ethical frameworks and European challenges that could be addressed by our collective research, I realized the demand for leaders who can think across boundaries, and that's what we were preparing to do. It was here that we formed research teams for our second-year projects. Five of us came together with a shared interest in populism and migration in Southern Europe. We were excited, ambitious, and ready to tackle how economic crises became migration debates, which became populist movements across Greece, Italy, and Spain.
In the months that followed, this vision was supported by structured group meetings, workshops, and training sessions delivered through the Laidlaw Scholarship. We received sustained training in research design, literature review, qualitative and quantitative analysis, and project management, equipping us to move from theoretical interest to rigorous, comparative fieldwork. These sessions prepared me not only to undertake this research with confidence, but also to pursue further postgraduate study and future research and publication in European migration and political analysis.
However, reality proved more complicated. As we designed our comparative framework for analysing populist rhetoric, tensions emerged, different working styles, competing commitments, and diverging visions for the project. By the time we were months in, we were two members down, and suddenly we were three, staring at a research timeline that had assumed five people's labour. This moment redefined what leadership meant to me. It wasn't about preventing crisis or maintaining the original plan. It was about leadership in the unexpected, being open to change, collaboration, and honest teamwork while maintaining a vision for the quality of work we were producing. We divided regional expertise and continued our project timeline, traveling to collect firsthand data.
Four weeks traveling across Greece, Italy, and Spain conducting primary interviews with grassroots workers and policy experts taught me invaluable lessons. I spoke with a Greek migrant about how austerity politics reshaped public discourse on refugees, learning to ask questions that opened conversation rather than simply confirmed our hypothesis. Navigating language barriers, institutional access challenges, and unfamiliar cities while maintaining a research timeline taught me resourcefulness and cultural humility I hadn't known I would need. Being away from home for that long, constantly adapting to new contexts while staying focused on data collection and experiencing cultural immersion in a manner I hadn't thought possible, I not only understood patterns of economic grievances but also discovered a side of myself I hadn't seen before, hardworking, adaptable, empathetic, and resilient.
Returning with weeks of interview transcripts, my two teammates and I faced the challenge of synthesis. Writing the research paper together meant negotiating interpretations, integrating different regional analyses into comparative insights, and managing disagreements about emphasis and framing. The process was slower and more difficult than any of us expected, but it produced work we were genuinely proud of, a rigorous analysis of how European political structures shaped responsibility-sharing and protection across Southern Europe, and how economic debates refracted through the migration crisis.
Presenting this research at the Laidlaw Scholars Durham conference, I found myself drawing on everything simultaneously, Smart Works data showing individual migrant women's labour struggles, populism research revealing larger patterns of how societies respond to economic anxiety through migration scapegoating, and fieldwork insights about how crisis politics operate on the ground. Learning to move between intimate coaching sessions and macro-level political economy analysis became one of my most valuable capacities. Questions from students at other universities connected my work to entirely different regional contexts, teaching me that leadership requires intellectual humility, curiosity, and adaptability within unfamiliar environments. Essentially, you learn a willingness to see your work through frameworks you never considered.
Looking back from where I started to where I stand now, leadership means something fundamentally different than when I opened that acceptance email. It's no longer about having answers or executing plans perfectly. It's about creating space for collective transformation while holding yourself accountable to those most affected by your decisions. It's moving fluidly between scales, from coaching one woman through interview preparation to analysing structural patterns across continents. It's building power with communities rather than for them, staying present through uncertainty, trusting that meaningful impact emerges from sustained engagement with complexity.
This journey taught me that leadership development is cumulative. Each experience built on the last: frameworks from workshops guided partnership negotiations, stakeholder mapping enabled rigorous populism analysis, and the discipline of reflection helped me navigate team challenges. The Laidlaw Scholarship didn't just give me skills or credentials. It gave me a community of peers tackling different problems with shared commitment to ethical impact, mentors who normalized setback as part of growth, and experiences that fundamentally reshaped how I understand my responsibility as a researcher, practitioner, and global citizen. That transformation, from eager applicant to someone who can hold complexity without collapsing it, who can lead with both rigor and compassion, is the journey I'll carry forward into my plans of becoming a leader in European migration governance and whatever else my journey has in store.