1. How have the workshops and discussions on leadership this week changed your understanding of what leadership means? 

The workshops and discussions have modulated my understanding of leadership, as I had previously been exposed to discourse on types of leadership, such as dove (quiet leadership) and eagle (loud leadership). Quiet leadership, in the sense of being an active listener, and loud leadership in the sense of being decisive in making decisions for the group. In today's workshop, I appreciated the spectrum of leadership, how it's all of these types of qualities of leadership inherently mixed together in every person, albeit in different quantities, as evinced by some peers having ties for their categories and some peers having clearly a higher number of tallied points for a certain category over the other. Among the leadership workshops I had attended in the past, it was my first time being given a case study, and it was very thought-provoking about how certain leadership qualities can play out in professional settings. Although the examples made it clearer which leadership category the character was meant to embody, I liked that the situation was realistic and that there was no single definitive answer to how to solve the leadership challenge in the case study. I feel like leadership, in practice, is much like that, in the sense that there are many ways to resolve dilemmas and behave like a leader, not only one right way per se.

2. How might you imagine applying one model of leadership during your Laidlaw summer on campus—either within the Laidlaw cohort or beyond this community? While we often associate leadership and leaders with seniority, how might leadership be modeled among individuals who are among the youngest people on campus (i.e. you!)? 

Within the Laidlaw cohort, I will strive to apply a mixed leadership model, one in which I can exercise flexibility in unexpected situations that may arise during my experiments in the lab, such as which corticosterone concentration to use or how long to stimulate the cultured cells with KCl. As a rising sophomore, I feel that leadership could be modeled anywhere, whether it's helping incoming freshmen find their way in a new environment or training new students in the research lab where I work.

P.S. The header of this blog features dorsal root ganglion neurons from a rat! Today marks day 6 in vitro for the corticosterone-treated group and day 8 in vitro for the control group. I'm stimulating my cells with KCl tomorrow, which I'm very excited about! :)