Three years ago, I gave a killer presentation and my imposter syndrome went away. I haven’t felt it since.
I didn’t know that I would slay my imposter syndrome that morning. I had prepared 60 slides and a story I was excited to share. Three professors and two friends listened to me talk for an hour, and then it was over: I passed my defense. I was officially Dr. Rebecca.
Titles never mattered to me. The defense was a formality and no one in my department failed. Moreover, getting a PhD is just the first step on a long journey of publishing papers, applying for tenure and proving oneself on the academic career track. So why did my imposter syndrome go away at this moment?
I’ll come back to this question.
Fast-forward 3 years without imposter syndrome…
Let’s fast-forward to present day: I’ve been experiencing a healthy and refreshing dose of confidence for 3 years, and I’ve transitioned careers from academic mathematician to data scientist. After hearing the story of my career change, a colleague responds, “We’re using so many graph algorithms. You should make sure they’re implemented efficiently.”
With this comment, I hear my old friend, imposter syndrome, slink back into the room. Can I really do that? What if there’s an algorithm that I don’t know? How would he react? What if he expects me to know X, Y and Z just because I’m a mathematician? What if I don’t? Wait, what does he expect a mathematician to know?
Experiencing imposter syndrome
Experiencing imposter syndrome means believing that I’m not good enough despite (plentiful) evidence to the contrary. It hangs over me as a constant anxiety of being found out as not-good-enough to be in the present company. Even when making small talk, there’s always another scary new technical term waiting to ambush me around the corner.
Those scary technical terms become an overwhelming list of concepts and buzzwords I don’t understand, and that I don’t know how to break into learning. I believe that everyone else already understands them, or learns about them in some secret club that I can’t unlock. I grasp around blindly for social cues on what I “should” know, but find no boundaries on knowledge and new ideas.
Making my own syllabus
At the end of grad school, I imposed helpful boundaries on my learning. For my presentation, I made a list of the relevant topics as well as topics that were out-of-scope. These lists quieted my imposter syndrome because I understood what I “should” know versus what I didn’t need to know in order to qualify as an Official Working Mathematician.
Three years later, when my colleague talked about the role of a mathematician-turned-data-scientist in a vague, boundary-less way, I felt a familiar jolt of imposter syndrome. I felt afraid of the social consequences of failing to meet an invisible standard.
But this time, I remembered that I had become an Official Working Mathematician by creating my own syllabus. As a data scientist, I could create standards for myself as well.
Standard-setting wasn’t easy. It’s still not.
Like it or not, there are no syllabi at the workplace. There are no formal teachers, and there is no qualifying or final exam to tell us whether or not we’re good enough for our roles.
Creating my own syllabus and standards are not easy for the following reasons:
- I have to teach myself how to do something I’ve never done before.
- I don’t have a monopoly on authority. Other experienced professionals have opinions about what we should and shouldn’t know as well.
- A young East-Asian woman being a standard-setter defies certain societal myths and expectations.
- I really like that what’s relevant in tech is fluid, and that we can leverage this fluidity to make the industry more accessible to newcomers. I want to set boundaries for myself without creating unnecessary hurdles for others.
Each of these difficulties is a blogpost on its own. For now, I’ll conclude with some tips for #1 and thoughts on #3.
Teaching myself something new
For me, writing myself a syllabus is empowering. I get to decide what’s worth learning and what’s not. But it also seems like magic–if I don’t understand something, then how do I make myself a roadmap for learning it? How do I get my brain to do something it’s never done before? And where do I get the resources to teach myself something new?
Here are some pieces of my process.
Choosing topic(s) to study
Whenever I hear or encounter an unfamiliar term or concept, I add it to a list of Words I Don’t Know. Sometimes, a pattern emerges like: “oh, all these words are related to Bayesian statistics. Maybe I should learn the basics of that.” Other times, different connections between the terms emerge.
I make a list of the prominent people and organizations in my field. What ideas are they talking about, and which concepts do they think are important? Who disagrees with them, and why? What unfamiliar vocabulary do they use?
I sign up for newsletters curated by someone knowledgeable in the field. Usually, newsletters contain a mix of articles from beginner-level to expert. Even just looking at the headlines every week helps me stay in touch with what’s trending. Often, the same themes will cycle through: I find it encouraging that even if what I learn now goes out of fashion, some of the core concepts will still come back.
Making a detailed outline
After choosing a topic to study, I make an outline that fills in the specific subtopics, concepts, perspectives and vocabulary that I want to learn about. To fill in the details, I start by looking for existing syllabi from course websites from universities, bootcamps or Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).
I also look up conferences for my topic. I get ideas for subtopics from the conferences’ annual themes, popular sessions, workshop goals, and recognized papers. Sometimes, conference websites also have lists of resources for students and newcomers to the field.
One problem I regularly experience when filling in details is deciding how deep to go into the field. Knowledge is endless, and so is the process of acquiring it. To help me decide when to stop, I look for cues in how experts change their language when talking to the public, students, and other researchers. For example, if I understand an expert’s explanations when she’s talking to grad students, but not when she’s talking to other researchers, then I know that my understanding is somewhere between intermediate (grad student) and expert (researcher).
Grad students working in the field are also a great resource because they have or are working through many of the same learning challenges. Many of them are happy to share syllabi or notes from courses they’ve taken, and some even maintain them as public resources online.
Finding resources
After creating an outline of subtopics, I look for resources that will teach me about each subtopic. Besides Googling, I shamelessly ask people for recommendations. It makes for pretty good small talk with nerds.
Sometimes, I write to authors of articles with questions about their work and recommendations. Usually, they’re happy that someone is reading their work!
Finally, when I feel overwhelmed with learning material, I like to remember theses words from Poet Andrea Dorfman:
“All experience is unique. No one has the same synapses, can’t think like you. For this be relieved.” –Andrea Dorfman, How to be Alone, 2009.
Defying societal myths and expectations
As a young East-Asian woman, I experience barriers to exercising my standard-setting authority that are unique to the intersection of my identities. But toppling these barriers is not something that I can do as an individual. As Author and Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “It was always the case that individually gifted and lucky African-Americans could go far. The fight for equality is really the fight to be mediocre.”1 Supporting the “fight to be mediocre” means believing that a rising tide lifts all boats. Fighting all forms of oppression together2 is the only way that any of us gets free.
However, there is still personal work that I can do for myself and in solidarity with others. Growing up in a sexist culture, I internalized the myth that my background was not strong enough to be a mathematician and that no amount of work would overcome these deficiencies. If you asked me point blank whether or not I believed these myths, I would have said, “Of course not,” but my beliefs manifested themselves in non-obvious ways.
One manifestation was as a fear and constant anxiety that I was not good enough, i.e., as imposter syndrome. I worried that my acceptance into grad school was only because of affirmative action. I was also very sensitive to (perceived) empty praise. When praise of my work was not accompanied by increased respect or social inclusion, I assumed that it was because my work was not actually good. It didn’t occur to me that the unwritten standards for inclusion and recognition might actually be higher for women than for men.
The repeated experience of receiving vague and inconsistent feedback and a lack of clear standards would give anyone imposter syndrome. Identifying my imposter syndrome as both a product of a sexist culture as well as a manifestation of my own internalized sexist beliefs helps me to understand and chip away at it. I can identify the sexist or anti-sexist values embedded within existing standards and to choose which standards I want to affirm, reject, modify or replace.
Footnotes
- Quoted in the Chicago Reader
- In the fight to change societal expectations on who qualifies as a standard-setter, a couple of thoughtful projects that I love are Whose Knowledge? and Nonbinary Folks in Tech.