This year I found out I had imposter syndrome. I learned its a lifelong battle if you make it that way. It is summarized as having feelings of fraudulence, instead of being happy with ones own accomplishments.
So lets talk about the last time I had felt imposter syndrome (which was pretty recent):
I have been using Python more in the last 6 months and have even used it a few times at work. The last time I used it was a few days ago where my supervisor asked if I could do some natural language processing on some data we pulled on customer’s conversations to see what are the most things mentioned. He usually asked my other co worker but she was on vacation.
I knew what NLP was but never really wrote code myself to do it. I told him I would have something for him by the end of the day.
So there I went opening my Jupyter notebook and looking for a package that used NLP. I came across TextBlob which a lot of its foundations were based on NLTK, another heavily used NLP package in the Python industry. A few hours went by reading Text Blob’s documentation and trying to apply it to a pandas data frame.
Next thing I knew, I was just copy and pasting things from stack overflow to see if it would work. Some things started outputting but not completely in the format I wanted. I started feeling angry at myself because I felt like I was not grasping the information quickly enough. I asked a co worker for some help who has years of experience with Python. He was not very familiar with Text Blob package and recommended NLTK. I started to feel a bit better that even someone like him was not able to figure some of the trouble I was facing with on the spot.
I then remembered my co worker had some NLTK script that she also borrowed from stack overflow with some different data but for a similar task. She had a script where she defined 3 functions; first to clean the data by removing stop words like “of, to, as” and reducing things to lower case and removing punctuations, then creating tokens with the tokenizer function, applying the frequency distribution to those tokens, and finally ordering them through a sorted dictionary. I just had to take the data I wanted to use and push it through all of these functions.
At first I was feeling like a fraud because I did not write my own script to do this, but then I remembered the first time she showed me this script a few moths ago I asked her what each step did and she said, “I don’t really know exactly, but I googled it and it said to use this”. I then started feeling better because even though I did not write this, after months of learning Python (currently finishing the Data Scientist Track of Python : 67 hours worth), I know now what each line is trying to do and I was able to adapt it to my own needs.
So that in its own was a true accomplishment, that I was able to take someone’s code and not only adapt it to my own but understand what was happening at each step, even if I did not come up with it on my own!
And that was a true sign of the fruits of my labor! I had to humbly remind myself that I did not get my BS in Computer Science, and had only really started this year taking Python more seriously. I know I have ways to go and hours to put in, but that I was at a good pace!
The point is, don’t be so hard on yourself, especially in the beginning stages of learning something new. I shared these feelings with my good friend, who also started to learn Ruby this year, and it felt good to know she also shares similar experiences about googling/using code from stack overflow for her own purposes.
I would love to know below any of your experiences in coding whether it be a beginner level, intermediate, or even at an expert level; and if you have ever felt like you had imposter syndrome and what you did to deal with it!
I’ll end with this article from Fast Company, which does a great job in classifying imposter syndromes in different types of personalities and ways to mitigate it. I am definitely the rugged individualist. Working at a startup so far it has taught me, that things need to move quickly so if you are stuck reach out for help and there is nothing wrong with reaching out for help. At times I felt like if I couldn’t do it on my own then I was not really excelling or proving my worth.
Like I said in the beginning , it will be a lifetime battle if you make it so! The best ways to mitigate this is to talk/ open up to others, volunteer and try to teach it to others, and don’t feel shy to ASK FOR HELP!
