Dealing with Impostor Syndrome — PhD student style.
Arrogance as overcompensation for feeling stupid
Impostor syndrome is the feeling of not being “good enough” or qualified enough to do the things you do. It is that unavoidable feeling of stupidity or fear of getting it wrong or messing it up when faced with the unknown or unfamiliar. We all suffer from impostor syndrome in varying degrees and at varying stages of our life. What sets us apart is how we ‘choose’ to deal with it — and dealing with it is a choice.
Honest research students will tell you, we spend a lot of our time feeling ignorant, incompetent and stupid. It is the most basic reminder that we are venturing out into the unknown. You find yourself trapped and lost in the fissure between a body of knowledge on one side so vast and sprawling it seems unnavigable and unintelligible, and on the other side you face an echoing expanse of the unknown which you have been charged with charting. A crushing fear and self-awareness overtakes you as you become cripplingly conscious of your limitations.
Whilst there might be an existential and productive importance to stupidity, ours can be the destructive type.Some of us assume the world looks up to us to be smart intelligent and competent, and will ensure that they do by serving out an unmeasured dose of arrogance. Just to be clear, though there might be a sweet-spot between the confidently humble and the appropriately arrogant, we are talking about those “arrogant”, mean-spirited nuggets.
In a group conversation whether it is at a conference or at the pub, the insecure student waits, and stalks. Like a desperate bird of prey stalking its carrion the student sits, senses heightened, phasing out everything but their target. The weather outside, football results, the lives and passions of their friends; none of this matters. All that matters is the opportunity to pounce. And thus pouncing, he digs his claws deep into any topic of conversation they see as their own and unrelentingly squeezes every drop of life from it.Why waste an opportunity. A captive audience ready to be gifted with your pre-eminence and wisdom. An audience in thrall, and it doesn’t stop there, once confirmed as a self-anointed oracle in your field why not branch out. Whether it’s an undergrad, a younger research student or someone who acknowledges their limitations, now that you’ve confirmed your intellectual supremacy you are apt to bestow your wisdom upon them.
However comparing the arrogant student to a bird of prey isn’t just overblown, it’s completely inaccurate, it gives an impression of subtlety and precision completely lacking. In reality they press their case with all the tact of a breaching whale or a squawking macaw, striking at any opportunity whether the iron is hot or not. They are the master of the shoehorn and the segway and have a thousand ways for saying apropos of nothing.
It is human nature to feel better than everyone else around us. This might be an evolutionary ego defence mechanism — no one get’s into a fight on the assumption they’d get beat. It is also one of the reasons why some people have an inherent satisfaction at the demise of others. What better way to mask your own feeling of stupidity than pre-emptively labelling everyone else as stupid. There are those who unleash a good dose of katagelasticism to mask the presenting symptoms of gelotophobia. So full of ridicule, nothing passes as good, be it your amazing new idea to troubleshoot an experiment that hasn’t worked, or your best effort at a report.
Embarking on a PhD is daunting, and to not be cowed into anxious panic by the task ahead, you must be either blissfully naive, under-stretched, or intensely arrogant. This sensation of stupidity won’t go away, and it’s something you have to deal with. Most people try to acknowledge it, manage it, perhaps even embrace it. However, an all too common solution is to deny it. Deny it to yourself, deny it to the world and seize upon any opportunity to prove the opposite. The spark of arrogance might be narcissism, but it’s fuel is insecurity.
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