Impostor Syndrome
Impostor syndrome is something everyone with any level of anxiety will deal with at some point in their life. It is the belief that you don’t belong where you are, that you don’t deserve it. Convincing yourself that you’re simply fooling everyone else in to believing you’re somehow capable of being here.
My earliest experiences with impostor syndrome
I’ve dealt with it a few times in my life. I had the second highest grade of anyone in my college acting course, but I was surrounded by ridiculously talented individuals. It didn’t make sense? Have I just fooled my tutors in to believing I am better at acting than I really am? Of course the irony here is that, if I actually had convinced them I was more talented than I am, then that in and of itself would be evident of some degree of acting ability. But that’s a conversation for another time.
Moving in to tech
Since my career change to tech, my first real job in the industry was as a network architecture engineer. In the hiring process, I got the job over an industry veteran with 25+ years of experience, while I had never even logged in to a Dell switch control panel or even heard of a DHCP. My boss must have seen something in that interview that I didn’t, but I was very anxious when I started that job. I was just waiting for them to realise that they had a made a mistake and asked me to leave.
In less than a year, I had been promoted to the second-in-command for the department, and my only direct superior was only one level below the CEO of the company. I have no idea how I got there. But I did, and I really feel that I earned it, too.
Moving in to Software Dev
I have since left that job, and I am now studying computer science to chase my passion in software development, and the cycle has started all over again. I am currently in my second year at university, I received glowing First grades in all of my modules in the first year. Including a 98% in my programming module. 98%!! That’s only 2% away from a perfect 100% grade in a university level programming test!
But here I am, looking at my code, working on my personal projects, and building the foundations for my final year dissertation project. All I can think about is how terrible I truly believe I am at this discipline. I can barely write functioning software, most of the time. My friends in the industry can write compact algorithms that I’d need hundreds of lines of code to create.
I’m not quite sure why I get the grades I do. I truly feel like I don’t deserve them. I’m still learning and I’m absoloutely still a novice in this field. But the one thing that my past experiences with Impostor syndrome have taught me, is that I’ll eventually earn it. I just need to keep pushing until I do.
In closing
This one became a bit of a vent, and I feel that a lot of this blog will continue being as such. This is something I battle with every day, an inferiority complex. But one day I might get over it!
Today is simply not that day.