In Manee Moua’s article, Navigating Graduate Education as a First-Generation, Hmong American Woman: An Autoethnography, she describes her experiences as a PhD. student in a mostly white institution. Moua mainly discusses the topics of race, gender, and culture within the context of academia; but what I found most interesting and relatable was her discussion of the imposter syndrome. Moua defines it as “self-perceived feelings of fake or fraudulent intellectual identity in academic and high achieving environments, often present with anxiety and fear of being revealed even if one has proven their intellectual abilities.” I felt that this definition was quite accurate to my academic experience in high school.
I attended Lowell High School in San Francisco, which so happened to be what last week’s reading was about. In San Francisco, Lowell has always been known as the school where all the “smart, stuck up, and competitive asians” went. Attending a school with this kind of reputation made me sightly self-conscious because when people would find out that I graduated from there, they would automatically assume everything about me and have expectations of me when they barely knew me.
I got the sense of the imposter syndrome because I felt like that while attending the school, all the other students were loading up with all AP classes for both their junior and senior years. However, I only took a total of 3 AP classes in my whole high school career, something atypical of a Lowellite. Sometimes, I felt as if I didn’t belong because my friends would complain about how they would stay up until 2am doing homework, while I would go to sleep by 11pm. Most students who attended Lowell might say that they didn’t enjoy their time there just because of the tremendous amounts of stress they were constantly under. However, I felt the opposite. Because I was able to balance my schoolwork and social life and manage my time well, I barely felt like I was buried under pressure to do well. This is just another thing that gave me feelings of the imposter syndrome, as I felt like I didn’t belong in the whole ‘high-stress” environment of Lowell High School.
Question: Does the imposter syndrome stem from internal experiences, external experiences, or both?
Image from SF ExaminerMoua, M.(N/A). Navigating Graduate Education as a First-Generation, Hmong American Woman: An Autoethnography. Hmong Studies Journal, vol19(1): 1-25.
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