Communicating research to the next generation of scholars and engaging in open, thoughtful dialogue with students are among the most rewarding aspects of academic life. There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from stepping outside the usual rhythms of research and teaching to speak with someone who is just beginning to imagine their own place in the field. It is a reminder that knowledge is not a static possession to be guarded, but a living conversation to be shared.

I recently had the pleasure of participating in an interview with student Yolanda Vargas Serrano for her outreach project, Acentúate, which introduces prospective and current students to Sustainable Energy Systems Engineering. The project itself is a commendable initiative, one that bridges the often intimidating gap between secondary education and university-level engineering by offering students a glimpse of what the discipline actually involves and who the people behind it are.

Our conversation provided a wonderful opportunity to step back and reflect on my own academic journey. We traced a path from my early student experiences and international mobility in Poland to my current work in higher education and research. That trajectory, which once felt like a series of disconnected steps, now appears, in retrospect, as a coherent narrative of gradual specialisation and widening perspective. We explored key themes across my research, including concentrating solar thermal energy, power cycles, thermodynamic modelling, and our international collaboration on high-temperature solar systems with colleagues in Tashkent. These topics, which occupy so much of my daily intellectual life, take on a different quality when explained to someone encountering them for the first time. The act of translation, from the technical to the accessible, is itself a valuable exercise. It forces clarity and reveals assumptions that usually remain hidden.

Beyond the technical topics, we reflected on the broader realities of the academic endeavour. We discussed the importance of overcoming research challenges, not as a sign of failure, but as an intrinsic part of the process. We spoke about encouraging student mobility, both geographical and intellectual, as a means of broadening horizons and building resilience. And we considered the development of soft skills alongside technical expertise, a dimension in Univeristies that is often overlooked in formal curricula but which proves essential in collaborative research, teaching, and professional life beyond academia. These themes resonate far beyond the boundaries of any single discipline. They are the shared inheritance of anyone who has chosen to pursue a life of inquiry.

Although the interview was conducted in Spanish, the underlying themes of scholarly inquiry, curiosity, and professional growth are universal. They transcend language and national context because they speak to something fundamental about what it means to dedicate oneself to research and teaching. The dialogue with Yolanda reminded me that outreach is not a one-way transmission of knowledge from expert to novice. It is a reciprocal exchange, one in which the interviewer's fresh perspective and genuine questions illuminate aspects of my own work that I had ceased to notice. For that, I am grateful.

I invite you to watch the interview, and to consider the ways in which each of us, regardless of our career stage, can contribute to the next generation's understanding of what a life in research actually looks like. The future of sustainable energy, and indeed of scholarship more broadly, depends not only on the work we produce, but on the conversations we are willing to have with those who will carry it forward.