Overcoming Impostor Syndrome at HCII 2018
When I went to the Human Computer Interface International (HCII) conference in Las Vegas in 2018, I was no stranger to academic conferences. But this represented an important first for me, one that had me as nervous and excited as a musician at their first concert: it would be my first conference as a published author.
At first, I had little idea what to expect. My team (Sophie Park, Amol Borcar, Joshua Yang, Anna Brewer) and I had conducted a research project on Element Selection of 3D Objects in Virtual Reality in Fall 2017, and at my professor Allen Yang’s suggestion I had reformatted and submitted it to one of his contacts in early 2018. After some revision and back and forth, and much to my delight, the paper was in. I was going to Vegas!
It was at this moment that my impostor syndrome kicked in, big time.
Sure, our team had worked hard on our paper, but I was going to be a first-year master’s student standing in front of a room full of international experts. What could I offer that could stand up to their scrutiny?
Time flowed on as persistently as a river carrying a doomed lifeboat towards a waterfall, and soon enough I found myself ducking out of the sweltering Vegas-in-July heat into Caesar’s cool halls. My anxiety persisted, but at first I didn’t have time to obsess over it — I was too busy trying to see as many of the other presentations as possible, and regretting that I couldn’t be in 10 places at once. Suddenly, though, it was my turn.
Looking at the roomful of professionals and scientists before me, I almost froze up. Thankfully, the time I had put into practicing my slide deck paid off and my mouth started going on autopilot.
It wasn’t until the middle of my presentation that I actually started to feel more comfortable.
No one had interrupted to say that I clearly didn’t belong here. The audience seemed engaged with what I was saying. No biblical plagues had suddenly descended. I was actually doing alright! I even managed to answer questions at the end without tripping over my own tongue or coughing up a sea of “ums.” At the end, I was rewarded with a smattering of applause that I could finally start to believe I deserved.
I don’t yet have the academic chops of the decades-long research veterans that attend HCII, but after my presentation, I realized that’s OK.
You don’t need to be an expert among experts to make a valid contribution. Everyone is unique, and that uniqueness gives each of us something we can teach one another.
My contribution came from a synthesis of my UX design skills, my interest in VR, my background in mechanical engineering, and of course from the months of effort and study put in alongside a team of equally diverse individuals. Sure, I hadn’t been studying my area for 20+ years like some of the attendees, but that mix of experiences gave me something I could teach that few others could.
In the end, I left HCII with the expected conference dividends: a wealth of new research papers and knowledge, a suitcase full of swag, and a small mountain of notes and business cards to sort through. But I also found a new source of confidence — not from believing that I had at last joined the lofty ranks of the experts, but from understanding that as long as I kept trying new things with new perspectives, I would always have something new to teach.
