When I put in my (semi last minute) application for the Laidlaw scholarship I never really thought that I'd get accepted to the program. Even when I interviewed for the program, received my confirmation email and completed my summer 1 research I still had no idea what the end of the program had in store for me. My third year in college was extremely busy and at times some of the requirements for Laidlaw felt like a chore. The world had opened up to me and I had so many opportunities at my fingertips that Laidlaw no longer had that special place in my heart. It was only when I got half way through my LIA and stopped to reflect on the past year and a half that I realised how lucky I am to have found this program and how much I’ve learned from it. The skills and confidence the Laidlaw program gave me allowed me to take on new opportunities and push myself to grow. I used to always be someone who stuck to their strengths. I knew what I was good at and I did it well. Yet over the course of the past 18 months I realised that this wasn’t good enough. I owe it to myself to keep learning new things, to keep pushing my boundaries and finding out what else I can learn. Before I started the program I thought that I was a good leader when the truth was that I just wasn’t a bad one. Student clubs and societies are often fraught with incompetence and egos. This makes sense, they’re essentially leadership training grounds. Nobody really knows what they’re doing and as a result it’s very easy to think that you’re good by comparison. The fact that I was able to delegate tasks and not throw a tantrum when someone didn’t like my idea made me think that I was a decent leader. However, I now know that I was only a good leader in compassion to bad ones. What I want to strive to become is a good leader in comparison to good ones. I think that a good leader can be defined as much by what it is than as what it isn’t. I’ve been exposed to so many different leaders and leadership styles over the course of this program that I now know what traits I want to emulate and what ones I want to avoid at all costs. I’ve also learned so much more about the nature of being a global scholar. As the Laidlaw conference was in Trinity last year my first experience of the global aspect of Laidlaw was my LIA. However, the global part of my LIA started earlier than most. In order to prepare for my project I have been having weekly meetings with the team at the MSCL as well as the other interns in my research group in order to plan for the project. My research group consists of mostly German professors and PhD students in addition to myself, a student from Japan and a student form the US. This has given our research group a diverse global perspective. Although it also meant that we’ve run into a lot of challenges along the way such as language barriers, cultural differences and time zone issues. We’ve taken all those challenges and turned them into learning experiences. My project focuses on educating and learning from the refugee community in Munich about how we can protect ourselves from heat waves. Over the course of this project I’ve worked with refugees from Turkey, Ukraine and Somalia learning about more diverse views. This helped me to understand what it truly means to be a global citizen and where it fits in the world. It showed me how linked we all are and how such similar experiences of the world can also be so different.