Imposter!

So after four weeks as a ‘Graduate Student’… I am still standing and able to dress and feed myself. Despite the occasional temptation to curl up in a corner and rock back and forth, I am still actually enjoying being back at school. The novelty of having an office is still yet to wear off, and the campus seems to possess an unending array of things to do and explore. I have also been able to launch myself head long into my research here, running in and out of hospitals and cancer support groups, reading and preparing to submit my first conference abstract.

One of the stranger things I have come across however, is the general graduate belief in the ‘imposter syndrome’. This belief appears to persist throughout the four year degree, and involves the general impression that you were mistakenly admitted to the program through some bizarre clerical error. This underlying belief consequently entails the need to maintain the constant façade that you are indeed intelligent, otherwise you will be discovered and the error corrected. Exaggerations aside, this phenomenon is none-the-less observable in classes, particularly first-year graduate courses.

With students possessing a variety of learning backgrounds, there are of course theories, concepts and noteworthy figures that individual students will not have come across before. Strangely enough, should such an example of this be brought up in class, students will adopt a casual and confident demeanor, followed by a knowing glance or nod, much like this was something they had covered in grade school. As the class concludes, you will see various students hurry to the closest computer to immediately ‘Google’ the unknown term, and gain at least a rudimentary understanding to further protect against the unthinkable being found out. You mean…you don’t know everything?