This post is part of the Diversity in Science Carnival on Imposter Syndrome hosted by Scicurious.
SciCurious wrote an interesting post today about Imposter Syndrome.
SciCurious wrote an interesting post today about Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon where people can't seem to feel that they are good at something, that they deserve to have their job or that promotion or what have you. It may sound really minor at first, but imposter syndrome can be insidious, pernicious, and prevent you from trying to get ahead and promoted, and even make you think you should leave your job.
Reading the comments
there, and on Dr. Isis' older post
about the same subject, made me realize how many people suffer from Imposter
Syndrome to a larger or smaller extent. And that surprised me a bit because I
rarely doubt whether I should be where I am. It’s not that I am very
exceptional: I did pretty well during my PhD (4 first author papers, of which
one with IF>10), but decided to switch fields a bit to become a slice
electrophysiologist during my post doc. I love doing electrophysiology
experiments, but to say that I actually know what I’m doing? Not really. I never
paid much attention to math and physics in high school and am deeply regretting
that now. If my PI asks me to do a Nernst equation I have to google a Nernst
equation calculator online because I cannot figure out how to do it myself. I
cannot program in Matlab or R, and am kind of afraid to learn it even though it
would make my life easier, and I get really nervous when I read papers that
have equations in them. It’s been almost a year that I have been trying to read
and understand the classic Hodgkin and Huxley paper about the action potential
and I still haven’t finished it.
And two years into
this post doc I still haven’t got a grant or fellowship for the project I am
doing (I am currently waiting to hear from fellowship application #4). That
might be because the project I have thought of for myself is pretty high-risk
and very laborious (however, I am slowly getting data that make me believe it
will actually work!).
So why am I not insecure about my place in science even
though I’m only a post doc and I am a long way from being able to say that I
made it? I can think of a couple reasons:
First, I’m generally an optimistic person. I have my fair
share of panicky moments, but overall I usually have the feeling that things
will turn out fine (and they usually do). Second, my mentors have not been afraid to
show that there’s a lot of struggling and rejection in science. When my first
attempt at getting post doc money was rejected, my PI told me that he only got
funded on his fifth grant as a post doc. And realizing that despite that
initial rejection he’s still in science was a big eye-opener for me. Last, I
think I’m pretty good at being happy when things work out well: experiments
that work, papers that get accepted, travel awards that I got. And I often
think back of how I felt when that happened. It’s embarrassing to say but I
still sometimes sing the song in my head that I sang when my first paper got
accepted. The only lyrics are the title of the journal it was published in….
Also, that’s what I love about electrophysiology: the
instant gratification of patching a cell and seeing its membrane potential go
to -70mV. It’s already a good day when that happens!
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