Perhaps a little beyond you?

Some time after that first, painful conference — where I had been interrupted in public and yet was still offered a position — I received the description of the research project I would be working on.

It lay in front of me, full of jargon and technical terms: the kind of text meant to impress funders and peer reviewers.

I felt uncertain, seeking reassurance and hoping my doubts would be dispelled. I walked into the office of one of my own professors. I showed him the document and said,
“It all sounds very technical.”

He took it, read a few paragraphs, looked up, and asked, without a flicker of emotion, the question that floored me:
“Don’t you think this might be a little beyond you?”

No genuine concern. No inquiry into my motivation. No, “Let’s see how we can prepare you for this.”
It was a verdict. An academic way of saying: Stick to your lane.

Was he protecting his own status? Or that of the field? Or was I really as incapable as I feared?

Years passed. I became a professor myself. And one day, a young woman’s application landed on my desk.
She was eager and wanted to become an assistant on one of my projects.

At the start of the interview, she smiled and passed on his greetings. That was when I realised who she was: the niece of that same professor.

The dark, perfect answer presented itself. It hovered on the tip of my tongue. I almost heard the sentence in my own voice:
“Don’t you think this might be a little beyond you?”

I didn’t say it.

Instead, I asked questions. About what drove her, what she wanted to learn, what she was curious about. I tried not to be the gatekeeper, but someone opening the door to see whether talent was waiting.

Because the realisation came much later: the most powerful thing you can do once you’re on the right side of the table is not to speak the same language. It is to break the cycle.

That professor from my past saw no future colleague in me. He saw a potential disruption of the hierarchy, not a future colleague. His question was not protection; it was preservation.

My silence toward his niece was my answer. A refusal to pass on the poison.
The academic cycle is not just about how hard you work, but also about how you help others climb the ladder once you’re on the right side of the table. That realisation only comes with time.

But I had been tempted.