Imposter Syndrome
Published:
The dinner I had with my friend was two months ago.
And that same day I started this blog post and named it “Imposter Syndrome”. But I never got to writing or even thinking about what to write until today. Our conversation wasn’t even about what I will write about but the vibes felt right. What happened to me reminded me of our conversation.
Today I received the worst grade I’ve ever received in my life on my most recent Organic Chemistry exam. I calculated my grade and it was impossible for me to end with an A in the class anymore so I decided to drop the class with one month of the semester remaining. Of course it feels like such a waste dropping two midterms and five psets in. The situation is also complicated by how 5.13 is a pseudo pre-med requirement that some schools like Columbia require to even apply there.
Deep down I know that the big picture hasn’t changed and that this performance by no means defines my intelligence. I thought I had learned this over the summer with the failure that is the past year of my UROP. Yet the do it all, with EMS and a UROP on top of six classes, mentality never fails to take over. I’m unable to dedicate my times to things and wonder why I fail at them… And to think that any success would come out of recruiting for a job at the same time.
Maybe a good benchmark moving forward may be if I can actively explain what and why I’m doing, leaving room for cool things to happen and to jump at opportunity. The silver lining in this may also be that such experiences, suffering Imposter Syndrome at times, may simply be a part of the MIT experience. It’s a part of drinking from the firehose. For tests that you ace, you don’t think twice about the others who may have completely failed it the same way you failed something else. It’s a shared experience that in this way, averages out.
*We were talking about my friend not taking advantage of the “women”-only opportunities handed to her because she believes that she didn’t need them to succeed. She was never at a disadvantage because she’s a girl so a handicap felt unnecessary. But now, it hurts to see her peers getting ahead with them. It’s not even that they’re exploiting something, they’re just playing the cards dealt to them.