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What new ideas, challenges, or other issues have you encountered with regard to your project (this might include data collection, information that contradicts your assumptions or the assertions of others, materials that have enriched your understanding of the topic or led you to change your project, etc.)?
- I've encountered a lot of challenges to my initial research assumptions. My consistent back-and-forth throughout my research has made me jump between different starting points for various books, and question whether or not I should focus more heavily on literary analysis or historical analysis. I struggled to compose an optimal scope for my project and even method to conduct my research.
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How have these ideas or challenges shaped the bigger picture of your research? Has the scope or focus of your topic changed since you began this project? If so, how?
- However, to better navigate these issues, I sought to reach out to not just my immediate mentors at Laidlaw, but also communicate with specialists in the field of my research. I called with a local author and translator from Taiwan to gather feedback on my research model, and discuss with her what my point of focus should be. Here, she helped me redirect myself to narrow my scope–focus on one specific book, 血樟腦– and take on my research from there.
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Now that you’ve engaged in Part II of the Leadership Retreat, reflect on a learning point that remains with you as a new way to understand leadership, and to incorporate into your own engagement, in the future.
- The retreat taught me that leaders aren't necessarily people who are named to direct a group of people, but better defined as people who are able to take initiative, communicate, act intentionally with the people around them, and seek to bring out the best in the people around them. In this case, anyone can necessarily be a leader, we just have to actively try to embody those traits, and work to bring them out in the people around us.
Student, Columbia University in the City of New York
Hi! My name is Celine and I'm an undergraduate at Columbia University studying Economics-Political Science and Hispanic Studies. In addition to these topics, I also enjoy learnings about China-Taiwan history and politics.
A big part of my interests and passions also lie in journalism. I work as a student journalist at the Columbia Daily Spectator, where reporting on university news. I love studying the things I do because the allow me to tell stories and learn about people from across the world, just as journalism allows me to do here at Columbia.
In my free time, I also love cooking, baking, running, listening to music–maybe occasionally singing some karaoke–and spending time with my friends.
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Hi Celine! That's so cool that you are able to communicate with international specialists and I totally understand what you mean about struggling to narrow the scope of your project. I also really like your last point about trying to bring out those traits in the people around us, because I do think that a good leader tries to make everyone else around them a leader too.