Impostor Syndrome

I'm writing this post because I felt the urge to talk about a little feminine problem, and I'm hoping that this will also teach me to spell "impostor" properly.

Impostor syndrome is, according to wikipedia, "a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments . . . Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be."

I feel like there's some issues with plural/singular nouns and pronouns in there, but it does get the point across. And though I called it a feminine problem, wiki also states that it's present in both women and men. I just hear about it much more in women, partly because of the whole affirmative action thing (I wonder if there's any difference across races), and likely for some other reasons.

I know I've felt it. There were plenty of times this past summer when I was certain that my work was vastly inferior to everyone else's, and that it was only a matter of time before that program higher-ups figured me out (this is, legitimately, the main reason that I have this paranoia of not getting the counselor gig). When Gretchen and I spent two hours during Moody's running manual congressional seat allocations, I truly believed that I shouldn't have been there, that the team really deserved someone who actually knew what he or she was doing (i.e. knew how to program...though I do legitimately think that having someone who knew how to program would have been a boon. This reminds me of the fact that I should really do some more practice on the python front). If I end up in electrical engineering, you can bet your ass I'll spend a considerable amount of time worrying that my lack of experience can never be made up for (is this influencing my current decision to focus on physics? Who knows.). Even if I end up in physics, or math, or whatever else, I'm going to sit around and worry, like I did this summer, that I'm not capable of accomplishing anything in the field, that I got this far by some sort of trickery and that, when I'm actually working, I will be unable to find new material, and I'll end up waiting tables at some tiny restaurant in the midwest.

Do I know, intellectually, that I wouldn't have reached this point if I wasn't capable? Yes. But that doesn't mean that I truly believe it. I'd say that I'm better about it than I've been in the past--I've developed a level of confidence in my abilities that I really hadn't had before--but the problem still exists. It's one that I hear out of Julie, too (hopefully she doesn't mind my sharing); she's not good enough, she doesn't deserve this, she wouldn't have gotten in if it weren't for x, etc. (Jules? You deserve every bit of it, and when you go to college and kick the metaphorical butt of your selected institution, perhaps you'll come to agree with me).

I'm still not sure what I'm trying to say with this. I guess it's a reminder to myself to be more certain of my accomplishments. I noticed at RSI that a huge number of people--including some of the very best (Gopika, I'm looking at you)--seemed convinced that they were the one person who shouldn't have gotten in, that they would be the one person who didn't get into xis college of choice. It's like how someone--I think it was Carlisle, but I honestly don't remember--had a bit of a breakdown to someone else--I think it was Kaylee--about the fact that he'd only published two papers, and everyone was so far ahead of him and what on earth was he doing here?

It doesn't get us anywhere, the worrying. I force myself not to, I guess because I realize that it won't get me anywhere. But what is it, culturally, that pushes us into this feeling that we don't deserve what we have? Why are we all so convinced that we aren't good enough? It could be that RSI is built up so much that no one, except perhaps Patrick, thinks themselves good enough, but then why does it exist in other places?

I'm going to find some books on the subject, read them, and then do a lot of thinking before not actually deciding. Hopefully the books both exist and are nice to read.

Buddy Reading and Real All-Nighters

Immediately after the frisbee game ended, I went back to the dorm (oh, how much lovelier life would be if I possessed a bike) to get my paper, then went to W20 to meet my peer editing group. I was with Dill and Anwar, both bio people. We started off outside, shooting glares at Vanessa and Ash's group because they had stolen our idea to experience the great outdoors. Anwar read his out loud first, and I lay down and stared at the clouds and focused on staying awake, then offered a very short list of constructive comments (his paper was phenomenal; very clear, highly technical, about using stem cells to grow retinas or something like that). It's fun to listen to him talk, because he's Singaporean but speaks English with a very good English accent; basically, the cross between Asian and british is entertaining. Then I read mine, which they both gave criticisms on while acknowledging that they didn't really understand the subject matter, since, as I mentioned, they were both doing biology.

At that point, the hammock freed up, so we ran over there and then spent about five minutes arranging ourselves so that we could all fit. Dill and I were on the ends, and Anwar was in the middle, and he's heavy enough that he was basically sitting on the ground. I'm sure that we looked rather silly. Dill took forever to read, because he had a lot (and I mean a lot) of typos and grammatical errors that he hadn't noticed until he read it out loud, so every two sentences he had to go back and change things, and then he'd go back a couple more sentences and read them all again. I was ready to scream (I have an extremely low level of pickle tolerance), and even Anwar was getting annoyed, and I was getting hungry and didn't understand the paper anyways, so Anwar loaned me his meal card and I went to get a bagel, as I was sick, and still operating on a diet where the primary foods were oranges, orange juice, and toasted bagels.

I ran into Olive and Hassan at La Verdes, and Olive advised me to "be assertive!" when ordering sandwiches. I need to work on that assertiveness thing. I got my bagel and went back outside, where we sat while Dill read until it got so dark that we couldn't see, so we moved inside and began passing the papers around for grammar markups.

That evening, I made those changes and went to bed. The next morning, I assembled a draft of slides so that I could give a practice talk for my mentor. I used Beamer. It was epic. I gave said talk. It went badly, very badly. Then I realized that the final draft of my paper was due the next day, and I was not even close to being done.

At 3 pm, I went to Simmons, showered, and assembled my supplies. At 4, I sat down to work. I got up occasionally, but I did not truly stop work until 9:30 the next morning. It was torture. It was bliss. It was so much fucking work.


I started out sitting next to Sadie, but then Bashir came over and started talking to her and moaning about how his paper was being so difficult, when the issue was really his very limited grasp of English language mechanics. I found the talking so annoying that I got up and moved next to Grace, who, despite having finished her rough draft two weeks in advance of the due date, was working quite diligently.


The next few hours are lost in a swirl of very focused work as I made edit after edit, including massive structural changes to my introduction and diffusion sections. Some time around 2 am, when I finished said changes to part four, I noticed a major hole in my analysis: I'd never definitively proven that products would not diffuse, I'd merely illustrated that they'd diffuse less than they would out of a standard reactor. I looked panicked, so one of the very wonderful nobodies, Rocky (so christened because somewhere in the annals of livejournal, there are photos of him at seventeen, all dolled up for the midnight showing), came to help me. He worked magic with mathematica while I cracked open my can of caffeinated beverage, and some forty minutes later, the image, the oh-so-perfect graphical representation of an equation that I'd hastily derived in the margin of an old draft, was done.


It was beautiful, and it is 86% of the reason that I printed my paper in color. Not that I had anything in the way of a legend to explain what color went with what element. It was just so darned pretty.


Soon after that, I was approaching my non-functioning stage, so I drank some more caffeinated beverage and went to take a twenty minute power nap, moping about my cold, solitary loneliness. I eventually woke up and stumbled back to the lab, where I started working again. I soon got a number of zephyrs from Kaylee and Hannah, who were trying to get together a late-night (well, early morning) fake Chinese food order. I zephyred (is there some other word for this?) Hyumni, and she reluctantly pulled herself from braid theory (I would love to watch her tear down anyone who saw the whole 'braid' thing and went "look, when girls do math, all they do is talk about hair") to help pick out food.


I finished the work-through on the redesigned diffusion section and left to take another nap, passing by Didge, who for some reason enjoyed working on the couch, with piles of papers surrounding him. We agreed to proof each others papers later (not that we ever actually did so), and then I went to get some sleep (well, fifteen minutes of sleep, but they were lovely minutes nonetheless).

By the time I stumbled out, Hyunmi had already obtained and paid for our veggie/tofu noodles. We ate them, and they were delicious. Something about tofu drenched in soy sauce and salty pasta is just very, very delicious.


I went back to work, after that. People gradually trickled out. By morning, the ranks were thin. Hassan was still present, as were Jasmine and Comrade Vito. I needed to wake up enough to move, and to clear out the stuffy morning feeling from between my ears.

I don't remember who suggested it, but a bathrobe-clad Vito and I ended up running laps around the lab for at least a few minutes, until I felt prepared to proof my paper. I printed it, then went about trying to find people to read it; if I remember correctly, Tramar was agreeable, and I read his as well. It was without doubt one of few that was written so clearly that it really made sense, though it's frustrating how, too frequently, clarity is confused with a lack of difficulty.


I had a donut and a coffee for breakfast, printed a copy of my paper, emailed another copy to Kaylee, then went back to the dorm and slept for four hours. When I woke up, I showered, then proofed the entire document before heading out. I made my changes at the Simmons cluster before going to W20 and having a second breakfast. Around two, I finally got Kaylee to myself, and we spent the time I should have been at my last meeting with my mentor frantically making changes to my paper. I then went to mentorship, proofed it one more time, just myself, then emailed it to my mentor's phenomenal assistant for color printing.

At five, when others were panicking, I had been done for over an hour. Which was fortunate, because W20's printers were not being cooperative. Many, many people did not have printer success, but they were fortunately (and most likely due to sheer volume) not disqualified from the competitive paper analysis.

Huzzah!

I only later heard the story of those who did not work with the rest of us. Susan, for example, stayed holed up in her room, working to devise the optimal method for preventing high temperatures and wind-related paper organizational losses. Bing did the same, though his room was less breezy. He also later informed me that he did not move from his chair for the entirety of the night, not even to use the bathroom. I responded with a "TMI" look which he took for confusion, and began explaining that since he wasn't eating or drinking during the time period, it wasn't an issue. At the very least, he's logical.

Yum Yum Dim Sum

After the end of the Rocky Horror adventure, Kaylee, Hannah and I removed ourselves from the cab and I, at least, went to sleep. Whenever Leila got back, I was far enough out that I didn't wake up (although this may have been the night that she and Joseph fell asleep in one of the lounges and she just didn't return. Wait, no, this was the morning that she slept through her alarm and missed her oral presentation practice leave-time, so she woke me up at 12:00 and had me make phone calls for her, because English over the phone is too hard to understand).

I woke up, made her calls, took my pills, took a five-minute shower, then got downstairs at 12:30 for the dim sum trip.

I figured dim sum were as good a breakfast as anything, so I happily added myself to Hannah's group of travelers, then proceeded to sit down and doze until we actually left. I have vague recollections of Susan and Sarah being the only other student girls on the trip, and us discussing the fact that I just eat what everyone else gets because I don't speak Chinese or have much of an opinion. I then talked with Bing about the fact that dim sum are apparently kind of like breakfast, or more like breakfast than lunch, so I really wasn't being all that odd.

I know that once I got there I sat at a table separate from Hannah, Susan, and Sarah, and that I was between Bing and Bart, and Sid was also at our table, and that Bart showed me Saudi currency and demonstrated how to fold it so that when you tilted it, King Abdullah (at least, I think it was King Abdullah) would smile and then frown. I remember eating a lot and feeling quite full. I remember seeing an extremely adorable small child when I got up to use the bathroom.

I keep getting this one mixed up with the last dim sum trip, which I already recounted, as that one also had Susan (although it had the people from Bing's country other than Bing).

We got back when the Harvard tour left, though I didn't go on that. I thought Dawson had, but then I found out he was sick, so I alternated between working and asking Gabriel, Dawson's roommate, if Dawson wanted any medicine. I'm not sure if I made much in the way of meaningful progress on the work front, but I did my best. That night (I'm writing about the 18th still) was the talent show, during which my phone went off multiple times.

As far as the show goes, I missed a couple of acts, most notably Pensky's dancing. I did get to see Bing beatbox, which was cool, and hear Nicholas play violin (he really is remarkable, but I don't care what Jasmine says, it is nowhere near enough to make me think that he's sexy. He's just too...too......Nicholas.).

I walked back to W20 with Gopika and Didge, and Gopika put further efforts into getting Engle to take her to prom (she was unsuccessful). I walked from W20 back to Simmons with Susan and Sarah, who gave me very good guy advice which I took, even though, as I stand in September, it didn't exactly help.

Rube arrived about ten minutes after I got back. He left about forty minutes later. I spent bedcheck panicking to Leila, then a good while panicking to Maxwell, then a considerable quantity of time sitting around and just plain panicking.

I really am getting very good at that.

I eventually went to sleep, completely unprepared, as always, for the following day's mentorship.

Rocky Horror Picture Show

The shopping for this took place immediately following the 2nd Milestone presentations. I gave some cash to Sadie and had her shop for me, as I had to work.

Dawson gave his money to Arthur and sent him. He realized only later that this would likely end up in something a tad more scandalous than his original intent. Apparently, though, when it comes to Rocky Horror, scandalous is what you're going for.

I know I went on some trip on this day, because I clearly recall coming back and being really, really exhausted, and then having to change in about 10 minutes flat, and having nothing to wear, and ending up wearing this long shirt that was "totally not revealing" along with sneakers, because sneakers are comfy. I maintain that Arthur worse sneakers, so they were fine, but I've been told that the fact that Arthur was wearing pink tights and an extremely short miniskirt negates this.

I borrowed tall socks from Minette and a belt from Kaylee, loaned my not-even-that-short-but-at-least-belonging-to-someone-with-a-vagina shorts to Dawson (who got a really, really weird stain on them, actually), and had at least three guys try on my one pair of pathetically low heels, in hopes that they could find something that fit (those they fit declared them rather horrifically uncomfortable).

We headed out, I fought to stay awake. I was that behind on sleep. We walked all the way there with relatively few odd events, aside from me walking briskly in the front along with James and Hassan because we looked less scary to whoever we walked past than did Ululani and Arthur, who were leaning more in the "going all out" direction, and Arthur's skirt rather inconveniently blowing up and scaring the bejeezus out of an innocent passerby (although I really could have done with out the spandex demonstration).

We got to the theater. There weren't enough seats, so I sat in the aisle and alternated between leaning on Zsa and Teresa, both of whom thought the show was very, very weird. Morrison was the audience favorite and got to get married. I fell asleep about twenty minutes in, and when counselor Hannah and tutor Kaylee decided it would be just cruel to make me stay any longer when I was clearly very ill (read: wanted an excuse to take a cab back), we left.

Most of the Rickoids we walked past were out cold. Apparently movies about transvestites are not our favorite kind of entertainment.

We prefer Truth or Dare.

Oh, and before I forget: Hi, Bart.

First Week is Done

And I am extremely thankful. I will, thankfully, not have to be awake before eight any time in the next five weeks.

I just made my mini-presentation, which I did on how sticky Nutella is, and I am now sitting in the computer lab next to Kris, who appears to be actually doing RSI related things.

The night before last was Meet Your Mentor Night. I got all dressed up so as to make a good impression only to discover that, in fact, my mentor had neglected to make an appearance. I sought out my tutor, Kaylee, who informed me that my mentor is Dr. Bohdan (I apologize if there is a legit person named Dr. Bohdan somewhere out there, because I blatantly made that name up) and that he hadn't been resonding to emails. She advised me to just show up at some point the next day.

So, that's what I did. Yesterday morning, I woke up at 8:30, ate breakfast, checked my email, and went in search of the proper building, which turned out to be converniently located less that one block away from the computer cluster. I found the proper room, and there was a woman sitting at a reception desk. I went up and introduced myself, and she informed me that she was actually someone else's assistant, but that Bohdan's assistant would be there in ten minutes.

I sat down and occupied myself with some engineering magazines (there was a riveting article about designing nanodevices to actively deliver drugs), and about a half an hour later, the assistant finally showed up. I introduced myself, mentioned RSI and the CEE, and she looked vaguely confused and then told me that Bohdan was at his summer home until Tuesday, but that she could make me an appointment then, so I made said appointment before leaving.

I then called up Kaylee, who said she'd come over and sort things out (because Kaylee has a PhD and is thus capable of magically sorting things out). She walked in, all business despite ridiculously tall cork platforms she was wearing, and attempted to find one of Bohdan's students.

The assistant's first assumption was that Kaylee was another high school student who believed that she, too, was supposed to be working with Bohdan, which I found somewhat funny. However, we did get ahold of Chad and Nelson, two of the grad students. They had no idea I was coming, so they called the other grad students, who also had no clue (including the one who, like me, specializes in the many flaws of the electricity transportation system), but declared that this was "typical Bohdan" and that they were sure it would all get sorted out on Tuesday. Then Kaylee left, and Chad and Nelson decided to give me a tour of the lab. Well, Nelson gave me a tour of the lab. Chad got somewhat bored and left after a couple of minutes.

The lab was completely and utterly awesome. There was a random car in the middle that had been opened up, so you could see the engine and all of its component parts. There were also various smaller engines in different locations around the room that Ethan and others were working on. There were types of lights designed to turn on in new ways (I'm fairly certain I'm not supposed to reveal what people are working on via the internet), and a giant lightbulb used to test solar panels, and screw drivers and tools everywhere. Nelson showed me what sautering (I'm sure I butchered that spelling) is, and demonstrated. He works with ultracapacitors, which are pretty much extremely awesome. I think my favorite bit of everything I saw was just the volume of stuff everywhere. Unlike the sterile image of a biology or a chemistry lab, in which everything looks so white and clean and new that one should not touch it (or, at least, that's what they look like on TV), this looked like my garage, but about 6x as dangerous.

I realize that I will most likely end up doing an experiment that is more theory than construction. However, the whole 'building' thing is completely awesome, and Nelson said he'd teach me to do some hands-on stuff if I wanted, and I think that I definitely want, because how can you really engineer anything without getting your hands dirty?

I realize that I haven't really done any engineering yet, and I've barely even touched any power tools, but I think it would be a good idea to learn. I'll have to have Dad teach me when I get home, although I'm a wee bit worried that I'm too clumsy to handle that sort of activity.

But if I can just sit in a room of component parts for all of eternity, I'm not at all certain that I'll care.