Growing up, I always looked at my parents believing they had everything figured out. It was a belief stemming from my naivety at the time, and yet as I’ve grown older I find myself feeling the same looking at everyone around me. For me, my initial reaction to feeling behind was to just work harder, study more or to join another club; but when all is said and done, I always find myself back at square one: seeing someone else who is doing better than me and feeling less than. It was a feeling I couldn’t shake, and self-doubt began to intrude my every thought. The constant comparison left me desperate for guidance, I craved a mentor who could help me accomplish the same things I saw so many of my peers achieving. In my search, I attended a speaker panel of women in fields I dreamed of being in one day: a woman with a Ph.D, one working with AI in hospitals to help treat patients, and one working for a tech startup in a high-level position.
All of these women were graduates of our school, St. John’s, with bachelors degrees in mathematics. As each woman shared their success story, I became more and more impressed, which was only proportional to the growing gap I felt between where I sat at that point in my life, and where I wanted to be. I felt such admiration for each and every one of these women, but to me, it felt like achieving anything close to what they had was unattainable. As I was getting ready to leave, I overheard the woman with a Ph.D tell the other, who is working in a hospital as a data scientist, how cool she thought she was and how she felt she could never do her job. All the speakers gushed to each other about how hard the other’s jobs sounded and how they were each so inspired yet intimidated by one another, and what struck me was their openness to admit it.
There’s no real cure for imposter syndrome or feeling like you’re behind everyone else, but that experience helped me realize one thing: everyone around you feels the same way. The gap between your achievements and everyone else’s is only as big as the distance you put between yourself and your community. Talking to the peers you admire and the professors you look up to will help you see how they themselves often feel like someone else is more accomplished than them. The key to not being left behind is to walk aside those you aspire to be like, even if you feel like you don’t belong there yet. Take the hard class, even if you feel like you don’t belong there; apply for the internship, even if you aren’t fully qualified; you will end up where you are meant to be. The only real competition is between the version of yourself you are today, and the version you want to become. Having the courage to enter a space you may not feel good enough to be in yet is exactly what makes you belong there, and you’ll be sitting alongside the kind of people you used to strive to be, now as one of them.