When I entered the Duke Laidlaw Scholars Program, I described myself as an academic provocateur: a title I wore with the confidence of someone who believed leadership was a function of rigor: dig deep enough, marshal the right evidence, and clarity would follow. Two years later, having moved through a spring gateway course, a Research Summer with an insurgent publishing platform, a colloquium, and a Leadership-in-Action summer inside a Toronto social-impact intermediary, I understand that the architecture of leadership is built less from certainty than from the willingness to remain in relationship with what one does not yet know. Laidlaw offered me an education and apprenticeship in listening.
Values, Character, Capacities
The Laidlaw Foundation's leadership framework rests on three Cs: Change Maker Values, Character, and Capacities. What the program taught me was that Character and Capacity are not built by asserting what you already know, but by leading with humility about what you don't. I entered every room across these two years as a student of the work before I was ever its author. That posture, curiosity held ahead of conviction, turned out to be the actual mechanism of growth: it is what let people trust me with responsibility I had not yet earned through experience, because I had earned it through the seriousness with which I was willing to listen first.
That humility defined my Research Summer with Liberata, a pre-launch academic publishing platform developed through Duke Bass Connections, where I was asked to design and execute the venture's first structured market research initiative, a stakeholder survey deployed to nearly 2,300 academics across 125 research universities, yielding candid, often unsparing feedback from professors, postdoctoral researchers, librarians, and journal editors. There was no precedent to inherit; I had to construct the methodology, defend it, and revise it against real skepticism. It was in this work of translating the raw testimony of people I had never met into something a technical team could act on with integrity that I first understood leadership as stewardship.
Confronting the Fear of the Room
The most consequential test of that stewardship arrived at a podium. I was invited to solo-present Liberata's research at the Laidlaw Scholars' annual conference at Brown University, an audience of scholars, faculty, and, unexpectedly, editors from Taylor & Francis, one of the very publishing houses whose incentive structures my research had interrogated. I have never considered myself an extrovert; my instinct under scrutiny has always been to retreat into analysis rather than assert myself before a room. But I had spent a summer arguing that academic publishing needed people willing to ask uncomfortable questions aloud, thus I could not exempt myself from that standard. I presented. I fielded pointed, well-informed pushback from editors whose institutional interests ran directly counter to my findings, and rather than the confrontation I had braced for, what emerged was a genuine, ongoing dialogue: an invitation to continue the conversation, editor to researcher, about what a more accountable publishing ecosystem might actually require. It remains one of the clearest instances in which I watched fear metabolize into relationships.
The Discipline of Stillness
If Brown taught me the value of speaking into discomfort, the Laidlaw retreat taught me the harder discipline of silence. Duke does not, by design, leave room for stillness; its cadence rewards perpetual motion, and I had absorbed that rhythm. The retreat interrupted it. A structured weekend of quiet reflection, journaling, and unhurried conversation forced the confrontation that reflection is the precondition to ethical leadership. I came to see my own tendency toward constant acceleration (the perfectionism and the compulsion to seize every opportunity). Growth, I learned, is not always generated through output. Sometimes it is generated through the deliberate absence of it.
What Endures
What I did not anticipate, applying to this program as an eighteen-year-old certain of her academic self-sufficiency, was how much of its value would be relational rather than intellectual. The friendships forged across two summers, a colloquium, and a retreat with scholars whose disciplines, geographies, and instincts diverged sharply from my own have become some of the most meaningful parts of my time at Duke. They are the people who understand this program and its teachings from the inside, and who share the same conviction that young leaders like us can effect change.
None of this would have been possible without the funding architecture that made both summers entirely unconstrained. Because Laidlaw funded the Research Summer and the Leadership-in-Action summer, I was able to say yes to a pre-launch startup with no track record and to a six-week placement in another country without weighing either against the need to earn. That freedom is what made the development possible at all. Between Bass Connections' willingness to hand a sophomore the reins of a live platform and LEAP's willingness to let me sit inside its most sensitive strategic conversations, I was trusted with a scale of responsibility most students do not encounter until years into a career. I do not take lightly how rare that was, nor how much it shaped who I am now.
Thank you, Laidlaw!! <3