Looking back at my university experience, it is quite interesting to see how my understanding of leadership has changed. When I was first asked about this two years ago, I believed that continuous improvement and asking for help was the essence of leadership, drawn in part from reflections on my insecurities and personal guilt of "CV-farming" in high school.

As I enter the last (real) term of my undergraduate degree, I've found that while my initial insight was doubly true, other aspects of leadership have come to resonate much more with me: namely, having the strength to be internally stable, carrying yourself as an active agent that can shape the life you want to live. As I observed the lives of the people I admired in my own life, I realised the importance and potential that a self-confidence in your own ideas and ideals brings. When you are able to cultivate this in your personality, people will be drawn to you as they feel safe, secure, and confident when they are around you. This makes it much more likely for them to support and advance the impact you want to see, albeit on a very local level.

But where should one get these ideas from, let alone be confident in them? For me, I think a profound experience I had was volunteering as a Patient Activities Volunteer at a hospital for a half-year, where I regularly helped dialysis patients pass the time through conversation. I didn't enjoy it at first, but eventually realised in hindsight that it fundamentally changed the way I saw human interaction and kindness, the latter being an ideal to strive towards. It made me want to lead a life where I could find it in me to be compassionate and kind, in spite of any experience of sadness or suffering I may have. Of course, this is easier said than done, but these ideas have given me an ideal beyond myself that I genuinely wanted to strive towards — something which I didn't have when I was a wee first year! (Back then, I was most concerned about getting employed, and nothing much more than that.)

The importance of consistency has continued to resonate with me two years later. Recently, I have been trying to get back into the routine of regular exercise which I had neglected for far too long. But more than any fitness benefit, I think the greatest benefit of exercise is to reinforce the idea that I can follow through with whatever I say I will. Without this, dreams will always stay as dreams; hence I hope that my ideals, on top of my consistency, will make me a better leader.

I am truly grateful to the Laidlaw programme, which has given me the invaluable opportunity to reinforce those takeaways about leadership — first through the LiA, which was the first time I had worked in a professional environment, and had the first taste of what it meant to have self confidence and take the initiative. The research project had also been a formative experience for me, as my eyes were opened to a different part of the world I never thought I would expose myself to. It has given me a newfound respect for Islam and the Islamic world, and has definitely whetted my curiosity about the human experience — a quality I believe is invaluable as the kind of leader I want to be.