There's a business phrase I recently encountered: "How global can you be, and how local do you have to be?". The idea being that the best way to do business is to be as standardised as possible to be efficient. In the context of community projects, I can guarantee that the more local and tailored your approach, the better the outcomes. Yet through my Laidlaw experience, I've discovered that truly understanding the local requires first developing a global mindset.

I used to be skeptical about travel. "Why spend hundreds of pounds flying somewhere when I could just read about a culture instead?" I'd tell myself. But having now been given the opportunity - the time and funding - to actually go abroad, to meet people in their contexts rather than just reading about them, I can definitively say: travel and meeting different people genuinely changes your outlook in ways words on a page simply cannot.

I didn’t need to leave the country to encounter global perspectives; I only needed to look at my Imperial Laidlaw cohort. The diversity within our group was immediately striking. My research bridged similar distances: though I was pipetting in a London lab, the PCR primers I was designing would eventually aid wastewater surveillance efforts in Bangladesh. Our training sessions further deepened this awareness, exploring how cultural lenses shape interpretation—how physical distance can read as autonomy to one person and neglect to another. These nuances fascinated me, but I knew that understanding them intellectually was distinct from navigating them in the real world.

Then I travelled, and everything changed.

My LIA placement took me to Mauritius, where I'd lived until I was five years old. Returning to the same house fifteen years later was surreal. As a child, I had no agency, no responsibility. This time, I had to be the adult - actually venture out into the world, navigate spaces, make decisions, communicate. I learned so much about differences there. Mauritians upheld community in ways that felt foreign to my London-trained sensibilities. They were stringent believers, and this devotion was apparent even in the policies they supported - positions I personally disagreed with, yet I began to understand the cultural logic behind them. People didn't use the corporate warfare of careful language that defines London interactions; they were direct, straight to your face. Strangers started talking to me on the street, something that seemed completely alien to me as a Londoner.

In the United States, cultural differences took different forms. I tried my first enchilada and discovered that when I asked for "tissues," I received only confused looks - they call them napkins. I was daunted by the vastness of everything - the roads, the portions, the spaces between places. The scale made me feel very lost, very small. I was also confronted by various stereotypes I'd absorbed without realising, and the fear these preconceptions had quietly instilled in me.

Looking back at my reflections, I notice something telling: initially, I focused almost entirely on differences. The lists of contrasts, the catalogue of surprises, the ways people weren't like me. But somewhere along the way, my perspective shifted.

In Mauritius, yes, people were different - but they also greeted each other with genuine smiles. They went out of their way to help a stranger who was clearly fumbling through relearning her birthplace. They took it upon themselves to become parental figures for me, looking out for me with no expectation of anything in return. In the United States, I had a four-hour conversation with an American-Moroccan man who ran a restaurant. He told me about his journey, about building a business in a new country, about how perspectives shift when you see both sides. These weren't just abstract cultural exchanges - they were human connections.

What struck me most profoundly was the realisation that when I sought common understanding rather than cataloguing differences, I found it everywhere. We're all humans. Just getting through life. Finding purpose in our own ways. Doing our little bit in the world, whatever that bit might be. The cultural competencies I've developed aren't really about mastering different customs or learning to navigate unfamiliar social rules, though those skills matter. 

The deeper competency is this: recognising that people approach community, communication, and belief differently, yet beneath those approaches are the same fundamental human needs - for connection, for purpose, for dignity.