I’ve spent the past few weeks reading Laidlaw blog posts from other scholars, and after seeing how much everyone has been learning and growing, I decided to try this reflection thing out, driven by how inspired I am (#fomo).

When I applied to the Laidlaw Scholar Programme, I imagined research papers, literature reviews, and long hours of intellectual immersion. I thought the highlight of this journey would be my research findings. While I have learned a lot about vaccine hesitancy, somewhere between deleting irrelevant abstracts and testing the limits of my sanity when Covidence crashes, I have realized that the people around me became the backbone of the entire research journey. Whether it’s getting into dramatic calls with my second reader that start with “does this trial meet the criteria?” and somehow spiralling into “Should I post this on Insta?”, or the now lifelong friends I’ve somehow roped into spontaneous golf trips, strawberry picking and booking to see Matilda the Musical (well, at least until March 2026), I’ve loved every minute of it. #ScholarSlay

Nothing says Laidlaw bonding like group therapy over mugs of tea—featuring my flatmates (and bestest friends) mid-debrief.

Every evening, my flatmates and I fall into a rhythm: we end every day with dinner together and chaotic debriefs (+ gossip sessions ofc). It's oddly comforting and reassuring hearing them talk about dissecting insects or machines and having “a moment”. They blame their equipment; I blame my attention span. Balance.

One of my proudest moments so far? Going from 450 full-text studies to 400 after deciding to exclude all systematic reviews. Genuinely, that little update gave me enough serotonin to last all week. And my friends got that. No one else would understand how deleting 50 articles could make someone that happy.

Outside of research, we’ve also been doing what I like to call “important fieldwork”: testing out every café in the city to find the best view-to-tea-price ratio. At this point, I’m honestly tempted to change my research question to “Where serves the best Chai tea in St Andrews?” Not technically Laidlaw-funded (yet), but if enough people like this blog post, I’ll happily pivot to a full review series—working title: Peer-reviewed and Tea approved.

Hard at work collecting vital field data for the café-location blog #sneakpeek

It’s easy to think of research as something you do alone. You, your laptop, and an excessive amount of Red Bull. And it has been that. But it’s also been much more. It’s been laughing in libraries, panicking over PRISMA diagrams, and celebrating major milestones when we write one sentence that survives the next round of edits.

So, while my research is going well (mostly), I think the real highlight of this summer is everything around the research.

And now that I’ve written my blog post, maybe I’m the one inspiring this time. #FullCircleMoment #MainCharacterEnergy #Reachingthewordcount #Ilovehashtags #flatmatestoldmetostopusinghashtags.