I keep starting to write this post and then stopping. This subject is very difficult to write about; it's very personal and one of my deepest professional insecurities, and I don't think I'm alone. You see, I was talking with a couple of fellow grad students not too long ago, one senior student like myself, and a fellow a few years younger than us. We were discussing data quality and publication, and I admitted that sometimes I feel like a fraud - sometimes I think my good data is all in my head, I'm imagining it, and someday soon some experiment is going to unravel my entire body of work. The other old salt agreed with me, while the young pup exclaimed "What, you mean those feelings don't go away with success?!?" All three of us were affected by classic impostor syndrome. I read that women are more often affected by men, although anecdotally I was the only woman in that conversation. I wonder if this is more common among certain fields or regions.
What I find even weirder is that as I achieve higher levels of success with my project, these feelings seem to intensify - the more I participate in the scientific field, the more chances there are that people will discover what an idiot I really am.
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