Feel like an imposter at university?
Jen Martin, School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne
Have you ever felt like a fraud? That you don’t belong? That you aren’t experienced or smart enough to be doing what you’re doing? Join the club!
Feeling like a phoney
To others you come across as confident, accomplished and kicking lots of goals. But on the inside you’re wracked with self-doubt. You feel like a fraud and as though someone is about to tap you on the shoulder and ask you what on earth you think you’re doing here. You’re sure your inadequacies and incompetency are just about to be revealed. Hello Imposter Syndrome.
In 1978, psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described this phenomenon among high-achieving women. Five years of research had highlighted how many successful women believed their success could be attributed to luck, chance or errors in selection processes. These women were sure their abilities had been overestimated. Clance went on to create the IP scale to quantify the experience of imposter syndrome.
Researchers have been studying the imposter syndrome ever since and we now know a lot about it. Research suggests 70% of people will experience feelings of being an imposter at some point in their lives. Despite the fact the imposter syndrome was first described in women, we now know men are just as likely to experience it. And it’s worth pointing out this phenomenon doesn’t qualify as a syndrome according to the medical definition. According to Clance, if she could go back she would call it the Imposter Experience since nearly everyone experiences it and it’s not a mental illness. But it is rife in academia.
Come one, come all
An important aspect of the imposter syndrome is the fact each of us tends to think we are the only one suffering from it. We listen to the monologue of self-doubt going on in our own heads and mistakenly assume it’s just us. But the truth is most people feel this way at least some of the time. When Olivia Fox Cabane asks incoming students at the notoriously highly-selective Harvard Business School each year ‘How many of you in here feel that you are the one mistake the admissions committee made?’, two-thirds of the students put up their hand.
There are a number of common features among people experiencing imposter syndrome. The vast majority of ‘imposters’ are able to successfully fulfill their work requirements despite their perceptions of incompetency. In fact, many ‘imposters’ are high achievers who fail to internalise their success. Despite ample objective evidence of their achievements, ‘imposters’ still feel like they are making it up as they go along and fear they are about to be unmasked. Sound familiar?
Other features of imposter syndrome are a fear of failure; a tendency to attribute success to luck, error or charm; and the feeling of having given others a false impression. People experiencing imposter syndrome often experience anxiety, may be perfectionists and may also fall victim to procrastination. ‘Imposters’ often feel they need to stand out and be the very best compared with their peers.
Tackling imposter syndrome in academia
The most common advice we hear about how to deal with feelings of inadequacy is to ‘fake it ’til you make it’: pretend you feel confident and try to ignore the nagging doubts. But I’m not sure that’s very useful advice, particularly for those of us who work in such a competitive and hierarchical system as academia. As Pat Thomson points out, feeling nervous about the quality of your work is actually a very rational response to a competitive academic environment (and particularly an environment in which some people behave poorly). Let’s remember that much of the problem lies with the culture we work in, not with us: according to the Thesis Whisperer, perfectionism is an academic occupational hazard.
Given the difficulties of changing the culture of academia, there is plenty of practical advice for coping with imposter syndrome. For example, you can remind yourself that you’ve earned the role you’re currently in and stop comparing yourself to others (easier said than done!). You can try to tackle your critical self-talk and become better at accepting compliments. Importantly, you can talk with the people around you about how you feel and remember that feeling like a fraud is completely normal. This is one of the reasons my colleague Dr Michael Wheeler and I recorded a Let’s Talk SciComm podcast episode about our experiences of imposter syndrome.
Another reason I believe feeling of imposterism are so common in academia is because by definition, we work in jobs in which we’re learning new things all the time. If we believed we already knew everything there was to know, what would be the point? Particularly as a PhD student and Early Career Academic, I found it useful to focus on what I was learning, rather than how I was performing. This is mindset theory: if you focus on how you’re performing, you see any mistakes you make as evidence of your inadequacy. But if you have a growth mindset, your mistakes are simply part of the inevitable learning process. And you can take your feelings of imposterism as a sure sign you’re taking advantage of new opportunities and pushing yourself to grow professionally.
Finally, if none of these tactics soothe your worries, take heart from Professor Jessica Collett: “Imposterism is most often found among extremely talented and capable individuals, not people who are true impostors”.
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