When I found out my Leadership in Action placement would take me to Vancouver, I pictured ocean, mountains, and a lot of hiking. I did not picture spending twelve hours stranded on a highway with half of Vancouver, two days before my first day of work. But we'll get there.

I'm doing my placement here with my course-mate Anna – we share a wall in Oxford, take the same classes, and have somehow spent every day of term together without getting sick of each other, so travelling together felt kind of inevitable. One week into working with the Translational Genetics Research Collaborative (TGRC) team at BC Women's and Children's Hospital, and it's already been a brilliant introduction to both Vancouver and to genetic counselling as a field.

Getting Here 

The journey out was its own small adventure, starting with me somehow losing both my phone and my passport in the Heathrow check-in queue... not my most responsible moment! Nine hours later, arrival wasn't much smoother. Too sleep-deprived to think straight, we spent a solid hour convinced our accommodation, Building 91, simply didn't exist. Buildings 90 and 92 were right there, but 91 seemed to have vanished. We ended up knocking on a stranger's door three separate times for directions. He was very patient about it. We're friends now, I think.

Joining the UBC Outdoor Club (and a Very Long Hike)

Before we'd even started work, we joined UBC's outdoor club, which has been one of the best decisions of the trip. Its an amazing format where people post trips, you sign up, cars and gear are shared, and suddenly camping every weekend feels achievable without owning any equipment.

Our first trip was a 6am start for a hike up to Lake Wedgemount in Garibaldi Provincial Park: seven hours of steep climbing and scrambling, rewarded with one of the most incredible glacial lakes I've ever seen. The hike itself was the easy part. Driving back down the Sea-to-Sky Highway that afternoon, a serious accident had closed the only road back to Vancouver, with no alternative route. We stopped in Whistler for pizza, watched England play in the World Cup, and assumed the road would clear within an hour or two. It didn't. As the hours passed, we moved on to Squamish, the town nearest the accident, and found what felt like the entire population of Vancouver sitting it out in a carpark with us. The road finally reopened around 3am, and we got back to UBC at 4am – a nearly twenty-four-hour day that started with a hike and ended as our unofficial induction to Vancouver hiking culture, apparently a fairly regular occurrence out here.

It also meant we missed our actual first day of work. Our supervisor's team read our 5am email and told us, in no uncertain terms, to get some sleep instead of coming in. It's not a small thing to have that kind of trust and care shown to you in your first week and it made an impression on both of us about what a healthy team culture can look like in practice.

The Work

Our supervisor, Jehannine ("J9") Austin, is the department head of medical genetics and yet has spent an extraordinary amount of one-on-one time with us despite an obviously packed schedule. Their team is small, just six people, which means we've gotten to know everyone properly rather than being two anonymous interns in a big department. We were invited to team dinner and drinks in our first week, and it's been clear from day one that we're treated as part of the team rather than as visitors.

We've also been given real projects, which I wasn't expecting and don't take for granted. The first is a decision-support tool – a website designed to empower people make informed, values-based choices before undergoing polygenic score testing. Polygenic scores estimate someone's genetic susceptibility for a given condition, and the research on how people respond to that information is sobering. One study found that over half of participants reported a negative emotional reaction (upset, anxious, or sad) after receiving their results, and around 5% scored above the clinical threshold associated with PTSD. Helping people understand what they're signing up for, before they get a result they weren't prepared for, feels like genuinely useful work. The second project is an ethical analysis comparing polygenic-score-based embryo screening to the more established practice of preimplantation genetic testing for single-gene conditions which we will start later. 

I'll admit I walked in with a fair amount of imposter syndrome, very aware of being a mere undergraduate surrounded by clinicians and researchers. It's been a relief and honestly a bit of a surprise to find that what I've picked up studying Human Sciences at Oxford has been directly useful here. We even met a very cool lady on the team who studied the same course at Oxford years ago and is now helping supervise our second project.

Outside of work, Anna's already tracked down what she swears is the best dance school ever while I've been running around all the dreamy forest trails. I feel incredibly grateful to have an extraordinarily kind team who have gone out of their way to make us feel so welcome, and having exactly the right person to share it all with (Anna). Between the hiking, the road closures, and the work itself, it's been a steep learning curve, but the best kind!!