As you embark on your Leadership in Action project, please plan to write six posts over the course of your time with your organization (photos, video and multimedia are welcome!). You should also plan to respond to six other posts from Columbia Laidlaw Scholars who are writing this summer—either members of your cohort, or members of the 2024 cohort, who are posting about their summer research experience. The goal with your posts is to allow the Laidlaw community to gain a sense of your work, and to connect you with other members of the Laidlaw program who are excited to understand what you are doing, and who are keen to share their own experiences too. Below are suggested themes and/or questions to tackle with each of your six posts, but you are welcome to take your field journal in other directions, too!

Post #1
Describe your community engagement project! If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, how has last summer’s project influenced your project this year? What tools have you developed to help you work on this project? If your project builds on what you did last year, how are you leveraging your past experience? How does working in a different modality change or deepen your understanding of your research from last year?

Post #2
How do you interact with community members, and what kind of conversations are you having? How do you connect with this community of people, and what common cause do you find?

Post #3
What does a typical day of community engagement look like? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!

Post #4
What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.

Post #5
What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?

Post #6
For your final post, reflect—either in a video presentation or in narrative form—on your project: What was the goal of the project, and what was its significance or impact (real or potential). Finally, please consider how your understanding of leadership (curiosity, empathy, teamwork, resilience, etc.) has informed your work or been deepened by your work.

If you are creating a video, please keep the following in mind: do not speak too quickly! Try to record in a quiet space with minimum background noise. While you should not read from a sheet of paper, practice your speech a few times before recording. Also, be sure that you describe your project in a way that is accessible to viewers who are not experts in your field, and who may not be familiar with your project. Your video should be relatively short–2-3 minutes is ideal!