The Moment I Stopped Fearing Public Speaking
Last Thursday, at the student conference of the Centre for Teaching and Learning in Vienna, something quietly extraordinary happened to me. Andreas and I presented our project on the scientific writing of first‑semester history students — a modest little study with fourteen texts, ten linguistic markers, and two beginners who still laugh at how long it took us to define things that now seem self‑evident. But beneath the academic routine of slides, timing, and methodological explanations, something shifted. I gave the first public speech of my life in which I was not even remotely nervous. Not the tiniest tremor in my voice, not the familiar flutter in my chest, not the involuntary choreography my body usually performs when German and public speaking collide. I spoke slowly, calmly, as if I had been presenting at conferences since childhood, perhaps even since infancy, like a prodigy of PowerPoint.
On the way home, I kept asking myself where this unexpected serenity had come from. I know myself — or at least I thought I did. I am someone whose voice sometimes shakes, whose hands sometimes betray her, someone who has spent years negotiating with German in public spaces. And yet, there I was, explaining our methodology with the composure of someone who had just returned from a meditation retreat in the Alps.
The answer, I realized, is simple: I trust this project. I trust it completely. I know it works. Yes, the criticism about not describing the sample was absolutely correct — and I accepted it with the grace of someone who knows that constructive critique is a sign of seriousness, not failure. But I also know that our project has everything it needs to grow into a publishable study: a unique sample, an interesting corpus, relevance across several domains, and a methodology that is simple, transparent, and surprisingly elegant. Our analysis is clear, our preliminary results resonated with everyone in the room, and — perhaps most importantly — Andreas and I worked together like actual researchers, not like two students improvising their way through a deadline.
We met regularly, discussed every step, questioned each other’s ideas without ego, and trusted each other enough to say, “I don’t think this works,” or “Let’s try your version instead.” We had the kind of collaboration people write about in acknowledgments: respectful, curious, patient, and occasionally very funny. At one point, we even developed a completely unplanned side‑project — a comparative ethnography of Starbucks branches across Vienna — because apparently nothing sharpens methodological clarity like switching cafés.
And through all of this, we had a supervisor whose intellectual generosity made us want to do our best simply because someone believed we could. A supervisor who came to support us, who listened, who added thoughtful feedback, and who then joined us for lemonade after the conference — the kind of small, human gesture that quietly says: I’m here with you, not just above you.
My favorite part of all this is that we never tried to impress anyone. We didn’t arrive with grand theories or heroic hypotheses. We arrived with fourteen texts written by beginning history students who kindly allowed us to analyze them. We chose a linguistic approach, defined ten markers, grouped them into parent categories, and developed writing patterns that are precise enough to compare texts without drowning in complexity. Nothing about this process is flashy — and yet it took us months to think it through. Months of refining definitions, adjusting categories, and discovering that simplicity is sometimes the hardest thing to achieve.
And of course, like any study, ours will have its blind points, its unfinished corners, its inevitable limitations — the quiet places where we still don’t know enough, still haven’t looked closely enough, still need to return with sharper tools and clearer eyes. Fourteen texts are a beginning, not a panorama; ten markers are a scaffold, not a full architecture. There is so much we have yet to understand, so many patterns that will only emerge once we expand our ideas and test our assumptions against new material. We are far from the full picture, and we know it. But strangely — beautifully — that doesn’t unsettle me. It feels right. It feels like the honest stage of a project that is growing exactly as it should. And even with all the work ahead, I believe in it one hundred percent, with the kind of conviction that makes limitations feel less like obstacles and more like invitations.
That, I think, is where my calmness came from. I knew exactly what I was saying and why. I wasn’t presenting borrowed theories or inherited data. I was presenting our work — something we built from scratch, piece by piece, with care, curiosity, and a surprising amount of joy. I felt proud of us, proud of our supervisor, proud of the friends who sat in the audience and smiled at us like we were giving a TED Talk, and proud of the future that suddenly felt very close.
This project taught me more than I expected. I learned what it means to do research as a team — truly, fifty‑fifty. I learned how beautiful it is to think together, to share the struggle, to let go of responsibility because someone else is holding it with equal strength. And above all, I learned what humans can achieve when their minds and hearts work for each other. It turns out that collaboration, when done well, is not only productive — it is transformative.
