As women in STEM, you might’ve heard of a phenomenon called imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is essentially when people feel as though there isn’t any validity to their accomplishments. This is commonly marked by people attributing their successes to luck or anything other than their own pure efforts. As unfortunate as this psychological phenomenon is, people who experience imposter syndrome also have an associated fear of people finding out they don’t belong, that they are frauds. 

However, I hope that being at Smith College will help with developing internal validation for your accomplishments because it’s important that we as Smith students genuinely believe that we belong here. It’s good to remind ourselves of the reasons why we got here in the first place. We didn’t get here because of luck or because of good timing, but rather because of the hard work and effort we put into our accomplishments. 

Source: Dalla-Camina, M. (2018, September 3). The Reality of Imposter Syndrome. Psychology Today.