My Laidlaw Journey: Character, Capacities, and a Growing Global Mindset

When I applied to spend part of my Laidlaw summer abroad, I had a fairly simple picture of what the experience would look like. I had found an organisation in Barcelona, an economic consultancy working with women and refugees, and it felt like exactly the right fit. I wanted to be in Spain. I wanted the placement to be with that organisation. And for a while, everything pointed that way.

Then, very close to when I was due to start, I found out they couldn't take me in August, which was the only month I was free once my internship ended. I tried other organisations in Spain, but the answer was the same everywhere: too little work at that time of year to bring someone new on board. It was a very difficult moment. I had spent my whole summer looking forward to this, and with so little time left to search elsewhere, I had to make a fast, unwelcome decision: stay in the UK.

Looking back through the lens of the Laidlaw 3Cs, this is where my reflection on character really starts.

Character

The instinct when a plan collapses at the last minute is to feel like the opportunity itself has been lost. What I learned instead was that resilience isn't really about refusing to accept a setback but more about how quickly you can convert disappointment into a search for the next option. I didn't get the version of the summer I had pictured, but I didn't stop looking, and I didn't let the closed door become an excuse to do less with the time I had left.

The second part of character that mattered to me was discipline. Once the work started, it was easy to treat it as just an internship. But the projects I was contributing to had a direct, tangible effect on the lives of girls and other vulnerable populations we were trying to support. Knowing that gave the discipline of finishing things on time, and finishing them properly. It did not want to let other people down.

Capacities

If character is what got me through the setback, capacities are what the actual work demanded of me once I was in it.

A significant part of my role involved engaging directly with funders, donors, and members of the board. I had to present findings, defend the conclusions I'd reached, and answer questions from people with far more experience and seniority than me. That kind of exposure is uncomfortable at first, but it forced me to develop the ability to hold my ground on an opinion while still being genuinely open to challenge. Presenting to a board is about being able to explain your reasoning clearly enough that people with more experience can actually engage with it. It is okay if you do not always have a perfect, irrefutable answer. That’s not the point, anyways.

The clearest test of this came when an opportunity arose to travel to Seville to meet people connected to the organisation's work. I said yes immediately, even though I knew it meant unravelling my existing travel plans and accommodation I had already booked. Rebuilding an itinerary at short notice is important for capacity-building: it’s about being willing to disrupt your own comfort and planning because the opportunity in front of you matters more than the inconvenience of changing course. That kind of flexibility — saying yes first and rearranging the logistics second — is something I don't think I would have done as readily before this summer.

Developing a Global Mindset

The people I worked alongside were the biggest driver of how my global mindset shifted. Board members and funders came from a wide range of countries, several with direct experience working in India, which operates in a context very different from the UK. I also had the chance to speak with people from Ethiopia and Nigeria about the educational policies and barriers they had encountered in their own countries.

What struck me was realising how differently the same underlying problem, access to education for vulnerable populations, can look depending on where you sit. A barrier that seems obvious from one vantage point can be almost invisible from another, and the reverse is just as true. Sitting in rooms with people who had lived and worked through those differences firsthand was a far more effective education than reading about them ever could have been.

Continuing as a Global Citizen and Leading Ethically

The hardest part of this reflection, honestly, is turning all of this into something forward-looking rather than just a summary of what already happened. But a few things feel clear to me:

1. Staying involved beyond the formal end date. I'm continuing to help organise a conference with the organisation even though my Leadership in Action output is already due. To me, that's the clearest evidence that this wasn't just a box to tick. For me, the commitment to the work and the people involved didn't switch off the moment the deliverable was submitted.
2. Carrying the habit of adapting my tone, not my substance. Working with funders, board members, and people from such different professional and cultural backgrounds taught me to adjust how I communicate depending on who I'm speaking to, without changing what I actually believe or am trying to say. I want that to become a permanent habit.
3. Treating seniority as something to engage with. Leading presentations for people well above me in experience taught me that ethical leadership isn't about waiting until I feel "senior enough" to speak up. It's about being willing to make a case, take questions, and be wrong in front of people who know more than I do, because that's how the work actually improves.
4. Letting go of the version of the plan I originally wanted. The Spain setback taught me that being a global citizen isn't about controlling which country you end up in or which organisation you work for. It's about what you do with the access you're actually given. I'd rather carry forward the willingness to stay useful and engaged wherever I land than a fixed idea of what the "right" version of the experience should have looked like.

If there's one thread running through all of this, it's that very little of what I learned this summer came from the plan working out as intended. Almost all of it came from what happened after the plan changed, and I think that's probably closer to what character, capacity, and global-mindedness actually mean in practice.