I completed my Leadership-in-Action placement with Sense about Science, a small, independent UK charity built around a simple idea: evidence matters, and people deserve the tools to make sense of it. Days in, I was already learning what All-Party Parliamentary Groups are, informal cross-party groups where MPs and peers meet around a shared interest, because I'd been asked to help with Evidence Week 2026, the charity's flagship event connecting parliamentarians directly with scientific evidence. My job was to recommend which partner organisations each MP should meet with, and I quickly learned that good recommendations needed a deliberate system behind them: I ended up reviewing an order of priority, constituency links first, then APPG leadership roles, then spokesperson and committee positions.
The second strand of my work was with Voice of Young Science, the charity's programme for early-career researchers. I helped scope panellists for the VoYS workshop, held virtually and based out of London rather than in person as originally planned, and my first list of potential panellists leaned too heavily on the names I already recognised. My colleague Katherine's feedback pushed me to think harder about what a genuinely representative panel actually required. I also built something closer to my own initial ideas: a resource called Thinking Critically About AI Tools, built around five plain questions:
Is this tool being used for what it was actually built for, who or what was it trained on, what is it not telling me, has anyone checked whether it works, and what am I signing up for by using it
adapted from the charity's existing Responsible Handover of AI framework for an early-career research audience.
Writing it, I came to think that responsibly adopting a new tool is less about the tool itself and more about who gets to ask hard questions of whom.
The most ethically demanding work came from another project: scoping research for a Public Engagement Partnerships initiative supporting SeaCURE, a marine carbon dioxide removal research site in Weymouth and Portland. Before anyone could design a community workshop, I had to understand a coastal community with a history of feeling overruled by outside decision-makers. Researching that context taught me something I don't think I could have learned from a textbook: that honest science communication has to start with understanding what a community already has good reason to be sceptical about, before you ever try to explain the science itself.
In my third week, I found out that a close friend back home in Toronto had passed away. I was thousands of miles from everyone who knew her, in the middle of a work placement I'd been trying so hard to do well in, and for a few days I genuinely didn't know how to hold both things at once. What I remember most clearly isn't the grief itself but what happened around it: Hayley giving me the day off, my colleagues checking in without pushing, and letting me be exactly as present or absent as I needed to be that week. And it was through that period, that I became close with Emily, a fellow intern and PhD student from Aberdeen, Scotland, we started leaning on each other, going for food, and eventually running together most weeks for the rest of my time in London. On my last day, the team gave me a card. Emily wrote that I'd been "the best co-intern and friend." Chris wrote that I'd been "a great addition to the office." I didn't think that I would have built such memorable experiences with the team in such a short time.
I can measure a lot of that growth against one small, honest benchmark: how I behaved in the Monday news meeting. In my first week, I mostly listened, quietly intimidated by how fluently everyone else already spoke in the shorthand of ongoing campaigns and assigned outlets. By the second half of the placement, I was volunteering ideas without being asked, and even seeking out extra work, I offered to help my colleague Chris scope a brand-new award platform for the John Maddox Prize, a project entirely outside my original remit that I asked to be part of rather than waiting to be handed. Underneath all of this was the same discovery, repeating itself in different forms. I came into this placement assuming leadership in science meant something like directing a lab or project. Six weeks at Sense about Science working closely with Tracey Brown OBW (CEO) taught me another version: leadership as the person who builds the structure nobody else sees, who takes full ownership of work that earns no visible credit, who pushes past the easy answer toward a genuinely representative one, and who, I learned this the hard way, is willing to let people support them instead of insisting on handling everything alone. None of that looks like leadership in the way I used to picture it. All of it, I now think, is exactly what leadership actually is.
In my final check-in with Hayley, my line manager, I told her that the internship had exceeded my expectations, that I'd been trusted with real, meaningful work from early on, and that the support and feedback throughout were consistently strong, including in the hardest week of my summer. In my last week, I got a glimpse of how it all nicely came together, sitting in on planning for an international roundtable on AI in research and publishing, involving Elsevier and Research America. I also worked up the courage on my last day to ask Tracey directly whether she would be willing to come on my own podcast, The Science Diplomat, a question I would not have had the confidence to ask in Week 1, and she said yes; I interviewed her after I was back in Toronto. That same week, going through the draft programme for Evidence Week 2026, the event I'd spent six weeks helping build toward, running 6–10 July at Westminster, after I'd already be gone, I noticed the reception included a panel called "Science Diplomacy: can we help the world align through science?", I remember smiling to myself. It's almost exactly the question my own podcast is named after.
Between all of that, I found time to fall in love with London itself, a colleague's recommendation sent me to my first real immersion in theatre, and I kept chasing that feeling afterward throughout my time there. I came to London expecting to apply skills I already had. I'm leaving with a resource that will keep being used after I'm gone, an appointment system that will hold together an event I won't even be there to see, a friendship from 3000 miles away and a much clearer sense of the leader I actually want to become, not the loudest voice in the room, but the person willing to do the unglamorous careful work.