Our new SIN intern at the British Consulate-General Toronto: Lara Kaute

This is John Preece guestblogging about the newest addition to the SIN Canada team – our intern in Toronto, Lara Kaute. Lara will be with us for about a month, working with Media and Public Affairs (MPA) and Scottish Development International (SDI) as well as SIN. She is extremely well-qualified to work in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, speaking four languages and being thoroughly educated on international affairs. Her interests in the sciences centre around biology, and we hope to use her expertise in our work with Toronto’s world-class bioscience facilities. I’ll let Lara take it from here:

I grew up in a very international family. I lived in France since the age of five, not far from Paris, with my half French and half Russian mum, who married a Brit. My dad is German and settled in Canada (Ontario) about 11 years ago after marrying a Canadian with Indian origins. On top of that I am a British citizen, as my father often reminds me, since I was born in Cambridge, UK, and spent the first one and a half years of my life there. My father is a Cambridge PhD, he has a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip hanging in his office, and when I am in Canada he tells me that she is my Queen. It is him I have to thank for getting me this fabulous internship. My stepfather is a retired British Army officer. He taught me and my siblings to have a sense of duty and practicality. My mother taught me to speak Russian fluently (I must admit I also went to a Russian school, two and a half hours per week, for about ten years), to sing Russian songs, and to be an Orthodox Christian.

I just finished my first year in two Parisian Universities: Sciences Po (Political Sciences) and Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC, natural and life sciences). Why two Universities? Well, because I am interested in quite a lot of things! Next year I will specialise in maths and informatics in the UPMC and in economics in Sciences Po. I chose Sciences Po for its reputation as a very international school. I would love to work on an international level to promote peace between different countries, as I feel part of so many different nations. This can be done both by means of good diplomacy and fruitful business partnerships, and I am extremely excited to discover a place like the British Consulate in Toronto, where this is what people actually work on. I also have the feeling that my internship will give me the opportunity to significantly better my English, which is great. And since I will no longer have natural and life sciences courses in the UPMC next year, I am very glad to keep in touch with science by working with the Science and Innovation Network.