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The Impostor Syndrome - A Reversed Sense of Entitlement
by Sini Ruohomaa
When met with a new problem or topic that you do not immediately "get" or understand, do you feel a wave of frustration? Does it sound more like "uh oh, looks like this is going to take a lot of effort" or "uh oh, looks like I'm too stupid to get this"?
If you identify more with the latter, you are suffering from a rather common attribution problem. How is it possible that particularly in universities, which are packed with brilliant people, we can find so many people who feel stupid or dense? People here are good enough to get into and even survive in the best university in the country, not to mention that the subject matter is pretty challenging, so why does it seem to never be enough?
The impostor syndrome involves thinking that achievements you have made so far have been more or less luck, and any minute now someone will realize that you are not that smart after all. It causes a feeling that you do not really belong among your peers - while they actually have the skills and attributes it takes to make it, you are somehow only successfully faking it. It was first identified in women, but subsequent studies suggest that men are affected in equal numbers. It is a bias that gets in the way of enjoying what you have done and learned, as long as there are still other things to do and learn left in the world.
Due to stereotyping both inside and outside our heads, the negative effect can get even worse if you are otherwise different from the peer group too, such as being a different nationality, in a gender minority or just not that tall. Not even being completely average in all ways will make you immune, though. It is also difficult to see past others having already reached a position to what kind of difficulties and self-doubt they had on the way - not to mention that those who actually did not "make it" are no longer here for us to compare ourselves to. Memory seems to protect itself and fade out our own past experiences of difficulty. This has the downside that everything we have achieved so far may feel it was easy: it only got hard where we are now. When the mental pressure gets bad enough, it may drive perfectly competent people to drop out, which makes it something of a management concern as well.
The way to counter the impostor syndrome would seem to be providing an external mirror to straighten up the skewed self image: make your students aware of the phenomenon and provide them with some reality checks. Make your colleagues aware of your appreciation so that they have something to balance for the academic staple of "let me just identify something that could be improved here" kind of peer reviews. Network and share experiences with people you identify with. Finally, you could also remember to congratulate yourself every now and then for being so good at pretending to be good that no one has managed to catch you - and probably never will! Sometimes you can even fool yourself with a bit of "faking it", so why not in this particular feeling too?
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The CS Blog Task Force
Sini is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the CS department, currently working on usable security in the Secure Systems group.
Aaron is doing his PhD in the NODES group at the CS department. His research focuses on mobile computing and energy efficient design for multi-interfaced mobile devices.
Ella is a PhD student in the Nodes group. She is interested in e.g. distributed algorithms, real-life data mining, clouds and ubiquitous computing.
Giulio is a Professor at the CS department. His area is Human-Computer Interaction. For more information, please find his homepage here
Tomi is a Professor at the CS department. His area is Software Engineering. For more information, please check
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Kiitos paljon tästä kirjoituksesta! <3