Hi all!

My name is Jasmine – I am a Laidlaw scholar currently in my second year of the project.

This year for my Leadership in Action project, I have the privilege of working in Dr Doyle's Gender studies medical psychology research lab at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre as an assistant on some projects focused on transgender individuals’ experiences of mental health and healthcare. This is an area which is extremely important today, given the political climate surrounding trans rights and access to gender affirming care both in the UK and globally. I was (and still am) super excited to work in this area - I know I have so much to learn about, and so much I want to contribute.

Finding my own LiA

Organising my own LiA was more difficult than I had expected...

I reached out to several LGBTQ+ charity organisations, however had no success due to factors such as language barriers, and a lack of capacity to take on a full time volunteer short term, as I would need to be trained and supervised, and would leave after six weeks, making it unsustainable for small charities, and my lack of training and relevant skills made me less useful to larger ones.

In the end I decided to reach out to research labs because I realised this would probably be an area in which I have more to offer in terms of my own skills and experience – funding for research assistants/interns is also extremely varied so I knew being self-funded and having some experience already would make me a useful resource for people working in these spaces.

Reflections on the end of my first week:

As of last Friday, I have now completed my first week working here (woo!) and it has been a really exciting and enjoyable experience. It was a quiet time in the research lab, so I was able to get to know the people who were around a bit more and ask lots of questions when I needed help setting up things (which was often).

I think the biggest thing for me to learn how to navigate was... physical navigation! The transportation system in Amsterdam is very solid and reliable, and there are lots of options I could use to get to work – but I did find it a bit overwhelming at first, especially as someone who gets anxious about being late trying to figure out when and where to get buses and trains from was tricky at first.

While luckily for me English is the second most spoken language in the Netherlands, I do find in most spaces I have to rely on context more or don’t fully understand what is going on because I have very little knowledge of Dutch. I would like to make an effort to learn more while I am here so that I can communicate more easily with people. Staying here has already made me more aware of my privilege as a mono-lingual English speaker, since the language is spoken so widely across many places where it is not the primary language.

Setting myself a personal challenge

I have decided to set myself a personal challenge for next week to make me practice my limited language skills – I am going to order a coffee in Dutch. After a failed attempt this morning I have decided that writing it on my blog will make me commit to this. I may even post a picture of it.