I began my PhD program a little under four years ago terrified of and intimidated by the other PhD students in the lab and my program more broadly. It felt like I was questioning every moment why I deserved to be there with these people that were clearly smarter than I was.
The pull to compare myself was so strong, so baked into the culture of academia. I constantly had thoughts like these about others in my program:
“They are so much better at expressing their ideas than I am.”
“They have so many better and creative ideas than I have.”
“They work so much more efficiently than I do.”
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
Plenty of others have written about imposter syndrome, so that’s not where I’m planning to go with this, but instead, I want to talk about other approaches I’ve seen and taken myself when these feelings of inadequacy arise.
What I’ve seen over and over again, and have done myself, is that when feelings of inadequacy emerge in moments of comparison, I tend to over compliment the person I’m intimidated by. As if my recognition of their superiority makes my feeling of inferiority more bearable.
Both my fear and over-complimentary behavior weren’t serving me, though, and I began to recognize and sit with that.
Beyond an acknowledgement that certain aspects of academia like grant competition naturally pit us against one another – I really didn’t get any external support on how to deal with these feelings of being in competition. I had to teach myself how to approach them every time they arose in me.
I began to work toward addressing this feeling by talking with other PhD students in my cohort about how we should feel comfortable asking each other tough questions about our work. Not tough for the sake of being tough, but tough in the way that it helped our own understanding of the presenter’s work. Where were the sticking points for us as listeners? What wasn’t holding up in a research proposal? What is the most interesting piece of the work, and can I, as a listener, help make it better? It wasn’t about being ‘mean’ to our friends so much as it was about trying to understand and better the science.
Trying became a sort of mantra. Try. Try. Try again. Fail better. In the words of Ted Lasso, “Be a goldfish, Sam.”
Perhaps practicing with those I felt close and safe with first helped me to feel more comfortable with those I felt intimidated by? Because eventually, I began to notice a shift within myself with senior PhD students. I used to feel my heart race when I had to speak in meetings and classes with the students who I feared were so much better/deserving/etc. I’m not exactly sure how and why I shifted away from this fear, but I began to see them in a new light, and I began to instead ask myself:
“How can I learn from them?”
Eventually I moved away from feeling like I’d never measure up to asking myself what I could learn from those I was intimidated by. And instead of trying to emulate them exactly, I could learn what my own strengths and weaknesses were, so that I could envision how we could support each other. This began to have broader implications for how I might be able to collaborate with other scientists in the future.
Looking for more sources of collaboration rather than competition became an important reframe for me being in a system that was so deeply imbued into the academic environment.
To sum it up in an easy list, my main takeaways for how to approach the competitive culture of academia might be:
- To ask questions for the sake of understanding and improving the science.
- To learn from those who may make us feel intimidated, rather than run from them in fear.
- To envision paths for collaboration when we feel the pull of competition.
The Lazy PhD 