Page 209 - A Life - my Live - my path

Retirement

more time coaching young people about to enter the
workforce.
How to behave at your first meetings, how to speak up, how
to write your first reports, how to complain to your
colleagues or management while abiding by the unspoken
and unwritten rules. These are just a few of the points on
which, during my career, I've noticed that young people
either don't know them or make mistakes when to apply
them. Those Schoolboy errors!
When I was a young engineer (in 1982, I was 31), working on
the construction of the cyclotron, my department head told
me one day that we had to attend a meeting at the University
of Louvain-la-Neuve with, among others, Professor MACQ,
who held the chair of nuclear physics. I think it's fair to say

that I knew a lot about nuclear physics. However, finding
yourself in a meeting with an industrial engineering degree
when all the other participants were civil engineers, Doctor
of Physics and, what's more, with Professor MACQ, you
must carefully weigh your words before saying anything.
In those days, I thought of a civil engineer as a shining
star in the night sky. Of course, it happened that at one of
these meetings a participant gave an explanation of nuclear
physics that was not correct. I remember not daring to point
it out. I didn't know how to express the idea that the
explanation was wrong. Then, piano piano, you gain
confidence, you learn which turns of phrase to use without
causing offence. But the most important thing is to have
been able to appreciate that in every profession, at every
level, there are skilled and less skilled people.

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