Becoming senior without losing your younger self

Nobody tells you when you become senior.

Because what does it mean to be senior, after all? There is no ceremony, no email, no moment when someone hands you the keys to seniority. One day, you simply notice that the room goes quiet when you speak, that people wait for your opinion before offering theirs, and that a rather casual comment of yours has somehow turned into someone’s week of work.

Suddenly, students seem a little less comfortable around you. You realise that you are spending more time procrastinating with profs, who invite you to join them, than with PhD candidates, who no longer think of asking you along. You disappear from the youth coffee break plans. And, at the same time, other faculty members start seeking your opinion, looking for you at lunchtime, making space for you at their tables.

Without quite noticing, you find yourself on the other side of a divide you never consciously chose to cross, or never even fully acknowledged existed. And every new invitation seems to widen the gap a little further.

The shift is quiet, almost imperceptible. But it changes so much, especially when you are a scientist who still finds herself working alone until late in the evening, like today, because there is a career to build.

For years, my principles were easy to state because they cost me relatively little to defend. I wanted science to be open, rigorous and reproducible. I wanted credit to go to the people who did the work. I wanted junior colleagues to be heard, and women, in particular, to stop having to prove themselves twice.

When you are an early-career researcher, holding on to these values mostly means refusing to compromise on your own behaviour. You can challenge the system from the outside, question its conventions, and stand up for the people who have less power than you do. Because, let’s be honest, it’s cheap.

What my naive younger self did not expect was that becoming senior would make those same principles so much harder to uphold. At some point, you realise that you are no longer simply challenging the system. You have inevitably become part of it. And now the question is not just whether you can preserve your own values, but whether you can shape the behaviour of the system itself.

Perhaps the hardest part is that the shift does not happen all at once. You begin to understand the people you once challenged a little better. You find yourself relating more easily to those who hold power than to the people you once stood alongside. You become more fluent in the language of the institution, more familiar with its constraints, perhaps even more comfortable with its compromises.

The first challenge is that power is invisible from the inside.

I remember very clearly how it felt to be in meetings where my contributions went unheard. I think that experience never disappears; it marks you forever. What I did not anticipate is how easy it is, once you have some authority, to become the person who unintentionally does the unhearing. I admit it: I hate being one of them now. You are busy. You already know the answer. You finish someone’s sentence because you want to move on. You have a thousand deadlines and the pressure to get the next job. Or grant.

None of it feels like a choice, and that is precisely the danger. Staying rooted, for me, has meant building habits that slow me down on purpose: asking the most junior person to speak first, crediting ideas by name, and noticing who has not said anything yet. And reaching out privately to those who I knew wanted to contribute in the meeting but stayed silent.

The second challenge is that compromise becomes part of the job.

Science is a business. I wish I could put it in a different, more altruistic and dreamy way. But it is what it is. Large collaborations run on negotiation. Deadlines are real, resources are finite, and not every battle can be won. And that hurts, deeply.

I used to see compromise as a small (well, big!) betrayal. Now I see it as unavoidable, and the real question is where to draw the line. Over time, I have learned to distinguish between what is negotiable (timelines, tools, my own preferences) and what is not (honesty about results, fair credit, and the way people are treated). Writing that list down, literally, has helped me more than any leadership course.

So has repeating a very small exercise: what is good, and what is bad? Those concepts seem so clear when we are children. Hitting somebody is wrong. Sharing is caring. I am not afraid to admit how many times I have been scared to see these two simple ethical principles diluted in my job.

The third challenge is loneliness.

As you become senior, the number of people you can be fully candid with shrinks. You no longer resonate with students. But you are not fully comfortable with the permanent, mega-senior staff either.

The reason is simple: your doubts carry more weight, and your frustrations can ripple through a team. You have taken on responsibility. I have had to learn to find spaces outside the hierarchy (friends, mentors, peers in other fields, and yes, sometimes the gym or the piano) where I can think out loud without that thinking becoming policy.

Put the importance back where it matters. This job can feel very lonely, despite the big environments we work in. But it is even trickier to deal with the feeling of not knowing where you belong.

The fourth challenge is the temptation to become the system you once criticised.

It is surprisingly, and scarily, comfortable. The structures that frustrated me as a PhD candidate start to make sense once you see the constraints behind them. Some of that understanding is wisdom. Some of it is simply erosion. Most of the time, it is experience. I try to keep a small test for myself: would the version of me from ten years ago recognise what I am doing as fair? If the answer makes me uncomfortable, I take that seriously. I question what I do. I revisit the angle.

The fifth challenge is seeing who you have become in the eyes of students.

This is the most heartbreaking one. I guess everyone has an internal reason that keeps them pushing forward on this career path. Intrinsic scientific curiosity (which, sure, I do have). Hard work and investment (which I have put in). For me, it was always about teaching and giving new generations a better chance.

Call me unambitious. I don’t care. I have never fantasised about winning the Nobel Prize. Publishing in Nature. Being named the best [INSERT HERE] under 40.

I know my weaknesses, and I also know some of my strengths: I am a good communicator, and I am a decent teacher. One who cares, who likes bringing out the best in every student. Who is able to sense what is really going on with somebody struggling to understand something. For me, it was always about lecturing, mentoring and educating. This is where I thought I could make an impact. This is what recharges me even in long days.

And yes, I have been very lucky to mentor dozens of early-career researchers and students so far, despite my juniorship. I had the amazing opportunity of watching my own PhD candidate graduate last month, while I was six months pregnant. I watched my most recent MSc student finalise his first manuscript without hating cosmology, or anything we did together.

But I am seeing how new students who come under my supervision fear me. They feel intimidated. They feel insecure. They feel the unreal hierarchy. They feel… the way I felt when I walked into the offices of my former professors and supervisors.

And that’s terrifying. When did I become that person? When did I become someone who makes a student panic about typing a few lines of code in front of me, just to make a quick plot so we could continue an explanation?

What did I do to make them feel so small that they would rather lie to me than admit they clearly haven’t understood something?

On this, dear reader, I am still puzzled. And it genuinely worries me that, one day, I might become so used to this that I no longer care.

Thankfully, I am not there yet.

So how do I handle it? Again, imperfectly.

I mostly keep one single principle: I want to remain kind. I surround myself with people who will tell me when I am wrong, and I try to make it safe for them to do so. I surrender myself of people I deeply admire due to their kindness, too.

I spend part of my just-earned but yet-little influence on things that will never appear on my CV: reviewing a student’s code properly, pushing for someone else’s name on a talk, building tools that make other people’s work easier, helping one of the early-careers in the team icing their next job application. And I remind myself that seniority is not a reward for having been right in the past. I prefer to see it as a responsibility towards the people who come next.

I don’t think principles are something you either keep or lose. They are something you practise, every day, under new conditions. They might well evolve. Becoming senior has not made my values less important, but definetely it has made them more expensive, and therefore more real.