Impostor syndrome in students: "I got in by mistake"

Hannah is sitting in the sixth row of her first calculus lecture. Someone up front asks about a theorem she has never heard of, the lecturer nods, says that is a good question and carries on. Hannah copies the question down word for word, because she does not understand half of it. She left school with top marks. Twenty minutes in, she wonders for the first time whether admissions made a mistake with her.

That feeling has a name. In 1978 the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described a state in which someone with a documented record of results privately believes the place is not theirs and that sooner or later it will come out. It is not an illness and not a disorder, and you will not find it in the classifications of mental disorders; the whole pattern is taken apart in more detail in the piece on what impostor syndrome is. University is an environment that suits it almost perfectly.

Top of the class, surrounded by the top of the class

The first thing university does is swap your comparison group. At school you may have been the one who got the material first and whose phone lit up the night before a test. In the lecture hall sit two hundred people who were exactly that at their own schools, and the average moves to where your personal best used to be.

The Australian psychologist Herbert Marsh has been describing a pattern since the 1980s that goes by the name of the big-fish-little-pond effect. Students of comparable ability think less of themselves at an academically strong school than at an average one, because they measure themselves against whoever is sitting next to them rather than against the whole population. The ability stayed the same. The pond changed.

Nobody warns you about this, because from the outside it looks like a step up. Getting into a demanding programme is good news and at the same time a ticket into a group where you will spend half your time below average even if you belong to the top few percent in the country. The difference between "I am worse than I thought" and "I am surrounded by better people" matters a great deal, and in the first term it is almost impossible to see.

How many students know the feeling is not clear. A review by Dinah Bravata and her colleagues from 2020 went through 62 studies and collected prevalence estimates ranging from 9 to 82 percent, depending on who was asked and what it was measured with. A good share of those studies were run on students. The range looks like a weakness of the research, and it is one, but it is more honest than any single round number.

The awkward part is that the pattern is not cured by success. If anything, the reverse. Every exam passed, every scholarship and every invitation into a research group raises what people expect of you, and with it the height you could fall from. A student after the first year therefore has more evidence of ability and more fear that next time it will come out.

A grade tells you almost nothing

Work has one property that a degree programme does not: somebody there sees what you do while you are doing it. A colleague waits on your part, a client replies or does not. In studying those signals are missing, and what replaces them arrives compressed into two weeks at the end of term.

Marcus handed in an essay, and three weeks later a B appeared in the system with nothing attached to it. No sentence about what worked, what was thin and whether this was outstanding work or work that happened to fit the brief. A grade is an evaluation and almost no information. Doubt takes what it needs from the empty space: the B means they noticed.

In an oral exam where two questions come up out of forty, the explanation settles easily that you mainly hit the ones you happened to know. That you studied all forty does not fit into it. Anonymous marking, credits and points turn a degree into a series of outcomes with no story attached, and everyone writes the story themselves. The homemade version tends to be harsher than reality.

When nobody at home has been to university

Kevin Cokley and his team looked in 2013 at how the sense of being a fraud behaves among university students from minority and disadvantaged groups. It turned out to be linked to psychological distress more strongly than minority status stress itself. The feeling of not belonging weighed more than the circumstances that had produced it.

The clearest case is first-generation students, the ones who are first in the family to go to university. They are not short of ability, they are short of a map. Nobody at home told them that you turn up at office hours with unfinished work, that a resit date can be arranged with the lecturer and that the classmate who talks confidently about methodology read those words a week earlier.

Not knowing the unwritten rules does not read from the inside as not knowing the rules. It reads as proof that you do not belong here. And because students barely talk about it, everyone assumes they are the only one in the year who is lost.

Grad school and a field that never ends

In grad school the feeling usually does not shrink, it changes shape. An undergraduate has a syllabus with a finite list of what to know. A doctoral student has a field, and no such list exists for it: the more you read, the longer the list of things you have not read.

"I do not know enough yet" therefore describes a situation in academia rather than a person. It is not a trait, it is what moving through a field with no edges produces. The difference lies only in what each person takes from it. One reads it as the plan for next year, another as evidence of not being up to the work.

A thesis defence then concentrates the whole state into ninety minutes. You sit in front of people who know either more about your topic or at least more about something next to it, and the single question you cannot answer gets rewritten in your head as a general verdict on your competence. The more useful reading is duller: the panel asks precisely about what is not in the thesis, because finding holes is the description of their job.

Three sources of doubt and how they look at university

Self-doubt does not have the same root in everybody, and when you are looking for what to do about it, that is worth knowing. It splits into three sources, which commonly appear together in one person and differ mainly in strength.

The most visible symptom tends to be putting things off. Work that will have your head judged on it opens harder than work that only costs hours, because as long as you have not started, you cannot fall short. Why studying is such fertile ground for that is covered in a separate piece on student procrastination.

The second symptom is the exact opposite and looks like a virtue from outside. Before an exam you revise for three days beyond the point where it makes sense, because extra preparation works as insurance against exposure. When you then pass, you credit the preparation rather than yourself, and next time you add another day. That closed loop is taken apart in the piece on impostor syndrome and perfectionism.

And then there is the silence in seminars. When did you last ask out loud a question you thought was stupid? Most people cannot remember, and the result is an odd state for the whole group: twenty people say nothing, each of them convinced they are the only one silent out of ignorance, and each reading the silence of the rest as proof that everybody else follows.

What can be done during the term

The cheapest step is to say it out loud. Clance and Imes worked with the feeling in groups precisely because it cannot be disproved inside one head; once three people at a canteen table say it in a row, it loses most of its weight. Finding out that the most self-assured person in the year has it too does more than ten arguments of your own.

The second thing is changing the yardstick. Comparing yourself with a classmate from a different school, with a different language background and a year more practice in the field, yields no usable information. Comparing yourself with yourself a year ago does: with what you could not read, write or even ask about back then.

The third is actively asking for what the institution does not supply. The question "what exactly should I do differently in the next essay", put to a lecturer after handing in, takes two minutes and comes back with information that a grade does not contain. Doubt is not fed by criticism but by blank space: where nothing specific is offered, the head supplies its own version, vague and merciless at once.

A few small things go well with it, all of them startable this week:

• Bring unfinished work to office hours rather than finished work. The lecturer then sees the process and you get feedback before you fall in love with your own text.
• After every exam write one sentence about what you did to get that result. Two terms later you have a list you can argue with.
• Ask your question in the first half of the seminar. The longer you wait, the bigger it looks.
• Tutoring somebody from a lower year is the fastest way to see the gap between last year's version of you and this one.

If you want to know which of the three sources dominates in your case, that can be mapped quickly. The impostor syndrome test has 21 questions, takes a few minutes and shows the overall level of doubt together with where it comes from. It is a tool for self-knowledge rather than a diagnosis, and any comparison with other people is approximate.

The methods that help differ quite a bit by source. One person needs a cap on preparation time, another needs to accept praise without adding a qualifier, a third needs to write the last success out as the steps they actually took. What works on what is covered in the piece on how to overcome impostor syndrome.

Hannah asked her question from that first lecture in her third year, because until then she had treated it as evidence of her own ignorance. The classmate who asked it back then told her he had read the term the day before in a paper he did not understand. He asked precisely in order to find out.