Jutta Stahl, Professor of Psychology at the University of Cologne: “I was afraid of colleagues who wanted to discuss with me. I thought I wasn’t researching well enough. ”
Image: Stefan Finger
Far too few working-class children still dare to go to university. This is not only due to the circumstances, but also to you.
Jutta Stahl can still remember that scientific conference on the subject of “Neuroscientific Methodology” that showed her that she was different. As usual at such conferences, she was allowed to present her research results on a movable wall. “So there we stood in a row, the other scientists who were also working on some doctoral theses and had their own partition walls, and me in between,” she recalls. But while many of the other doctoral students had built themselves up very self-confidently and addressed professors strolling by, she herself hid behind her partition. “I was afraid of colleagues who wanted to discuss with me. I thought I wasn’t researching well enough. “
Katrin Hummel
Editor in the “Life” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Miriam Schwarz has also had relevant experience in this direction. After completing her doctorate in molecular sciences and a research stay at Stanford, when she went on to train as a patent attorney in a London firm, she met a young lawyer there who was doing the same training in Munich and who now wanted to sit in London for three months. “He came in and had a very different presence than me: the way he spoke and the way he gesticulated, that intimidated me, I felt stupid and thought he was better than me,” she says and still sounds bit stunned. But then she went out to eat with him one lunchtime and found out that his father had a law firm, “and then I suddenly understood that he had grown up with this way of gesturing and speaking”.
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