Imposter Syndrome

As a newcomer to artificial intelligence I can assure you I have experienced imposter syndrome and probably still do sometimes. After a six-week summer lab in AI, I have now landed at Mila as an intern under the supervision of Dr. Yoshua Bengio. In the blink of an eye, my team and I gravitated to the most advanced institution in the world under one of the most influential researchers. SO…. How did this happen? I don’t fit it in, what am I doing here?

First thing I had to go through was accepting that I do not come from a computer science background. AI is not only for computer scientists and no matter what background you are from, you will be useful to the AI community. Why is that? Well, it is no secret that artificial intelligence and machine learning can be applied to all types of fields and specialists from all types of fields will be crucial to the implementation of AI. Understanding this made me feel better, it took some time because new environments are overwhelming and adapting takes a little bit of time.

Different points of view can help and push people to yield greater things and in the big picture potentially prevent certain mishaps to occur. The feeling of feeling like a fraud and feeling like you got somewhere due to amazing luck is a romanticized idea of fate and destiny and its about time to take credit for our own accomplishments.

Here it is, I am a junior engineer who has completed her master’s thesis on developing a horticultural substrate made out of porous concrete and who is currently working on creating a gender bias dataset in order to tackle gender bias in text.