When I got the email confirming I was to be a Laidlaw Scholar in the 2025 Cohort, I knew I was at the edge of a transformational journey, but could never have predicted just how much it would change my life. This was the first time someone had made the conscious decision to believe and invest in my ideas and potential to be a change-maker. I had high hopes but low expectations when I submitted my application - I wasn't sure if I'm the "type" of person they were looking for. When I walked into orientation and met my cohort for the first time, I realized there is no archetype for a Laidlaw Scholar. Our strength and value lies in our diversity, our difference of opinion and lived experience, our range of studies and breadth of research interests.

From the invaluable leadership sessions I have learned about different communication and conflict resolution styles, the many ways in which we can express our passions and act on what we care about for the betterment of others. My research summer taught me the value of intellectual friction, confusion and dead ends to building academic resilience and generating fresh ideas in the iterative process. The Oxford Character Project equipped me with the language to understand my own traits, strengths and weaknesses so that I may work towards better. In my cohort I found lifelong friendship, cherished memories and endless inspiration. The team behind this program at the University of Toronto gave me the purest form of support - freedom to grow, explore, develop and express myself in both the self-journey to becoming a scholar and the community-centred process of becoming a leader - even in the quiet and invisible ways. The Laidlaw Foundation, above all, gave us the tools to shine and pursue what we believe in. By pushing us to immerse ourselves in a community unfamiliar to us through the Experience Abroad, and to create sustainable impact based on their needs rather than ours - we not only had our worldviews expanded but faced discomfort, challenges, failures and faced the unknown. All of this built resilience, learning and a degree of impact that ultimately served as an affirmation of our ability to make a difference. The program was much more a propellant of our desire and ability to serve others than a list of requirements to check off; it is an experience I will always be grateful for and never stop commending!

Going forward, I want to keep practising leadership the way this programme taught me to understand it: from the bottom up, in service of communities. My LiA left me with great conviction that the people closest to a problem usually understand it better than those claiming to have solutions to it, so the core of what I want to do is build the conditions for them to be heard by the people with the power to act. This means holding myself to the standard the Laidlaw Foundation helped us set for ourselves: measuring impact by what a community needs and how they feel about it, not by what we as academics and practitioners assume from our readings or find personally interesting.