The Impostor Effect

While doing my bachelor's at Bishop's, I was confident, overall, in my ability to do math. I knew that I wasn't the best, that I might not be able to ever discover anything new or exciting, that "Aki's Theorem" might remain a figment of my overly-ambitious imagination. And granted, from time to time I suffered from what the faculty and I affectionately (I think) referred to as "existential crises", times during which I doubted my math ability and understanding, but they usually passed in a day or two, and only happened about once a semester. The rest of the time, I was quite happily learning, and proving things that I found interesting.

Then, upon arriving at SFU and attending my first few lectures, I truly understood for the first time what complete and utter incomprehension was. (For example, it took me 2 months to realize that there was a difference between the polynomial ring F[x] and it's field of fractions F(x), I just figured that the square and round brackets were interchangeable, which, by the way (for you non-math people) is a disgustingly embarrassing error.)

And, worse than incomprehension, I started to suffer from The Impostor Effect (with capitals). I felt like I shouldn't be here, that I didn't deserve my bachelor's, and that one day everybody would wake up, understand the level of my incomprehension, point their fingers, and banish me. At times, this fear was so great that part of me wished that this would just happen so that I would be able to just give up the farce and leave, lick my wounds in private. Of course, this did not happen, I'm still here, trudging along, keeping my head down, and hoping nobody will notice the imposer among them...

It's not as bad this semester. For one, I'm taking 700-level courses instead of 800-level, which makes a big difference. But still, once in a while (coinciding unsurprisingly enough with days devoted to trying, quite unsuccessfully, to do my assignments), the Imposer Effect returns, and catches me unguarded.

Today is one of those days... I'm working on my second to last assignment for my Galois Theory class (which incidentally is pretty much a prerequisite for the Algebra class I took last term, which effectively killed my math-self-esteem), and it's not going so well. Once again I'm having trouble understanding how the questions asked have anything to do with the material seen in class... and when I do see the link, I still have no clue how to even start trying to prove anything. I'm a firm believer in the importance of a "mickey-mouse-question": when starting an assignment, if you're able to do a question, completely, and in a quite straight-forward way, then it's like a mental tap on the back. I say to myself, "yes, I can do this, I understand something after all", and thinking this, more often than not, will encourage me to try harder to answer the other problems. Of course, when I can't answer anything, then my worry is: "was there a mickey-mouse-question here somewhere that I can't do?? And if there is, how come I can't do it??", which then distracts me from my actual assigned questions.

Well there's my rant on feeling like an imposer, that was a nice break from Math (capitalized also). Now, of course, I have to go back and write something, anything, so that my professors think that I understand something, which is the catch of this whole story: No matter how much I hate feeling like an Imposer, it seems that I fear being discovered too much to give up the whole charade.