{"id":2783,"date":"2018-05-30T22:24:10","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T22:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spokane.wsu.edu\/extra\/?p=2783"},"modified":"2018-05-31T15:51:06","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T15:51:06","slug":"researcher-explores-people-stem-fields-feel-like-impostors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spokane.wsu.edu\/news\/campus-community\/researcher-explores-people-stem-fields-feel-like-impostors\/","title":{"rendered":"Researcher explores why some people in STEM and medicine fields feel like impostors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"researcher<\/a>High-achieving college students may first experience the \u201cimpostor phenomenon\u201d when they get to graduate school. They not only find themselves surrounded by other high achievers, but in a program where the measurements of success are unfamiliar and somewhat undefined.<\/p>\n

At least that\u2019s some of what faculty researcher Devasmita Chakraverty has found.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t know exactly when they are going to graduate, or how many papers they have to publish,\u201d Chakraverty said. \u201cThey talk about feeling like a tiny fish in a big sea, and how everyone around them is bright and intelligent, making them question if they got there by mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another cause of the impostor feeling appears rooted in the cues people get from others around them, Chakraverty reports.<\/p>\n

Female physicians describe being mistaken for an M.D. student or nurse by older physicians or patients, while conversely, some male medical students were mistaken to be doctors. Also, some graduate students and young faculty describe comments or actions from those in higher positions of authority that could be conceived as sexual harassment or racism.<\/p>\n

Chakraverty, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the WSU College of Education in Spokane. In the six months since she started this project, she has received more than 550 completed surveys from graduate students and postdocs in STEM programs all over the country as well as from faculty, medical students, residents, and physicians. She has conducted telephone interviews with nearly 200 of the survey takers.<\/p>\n

A United States psychologist, Pauline R. Clance, Ph.D., coined the term \u201cImpostor Phenomenon\u201d in the late 1970s but the research about it has been mostly quantitative, with far fewer qualitative studies, Chakraverty said.<\/p>\n

Chakraverty used to be a bench-scientist, working with cells and molecules, and completed her M.P.H. from the University of Washington. She now focuses on understanding human behavior, especially in academic and professional settings, and has been a full-time educational researcher since 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love people\u2019s stories,\u201d Chakraverty said. \u201cI\u2019m a qualitative researcher at heart and I like to hear about people\u2019s fascinating life trajectories.\u201d<\/p>\n

She conducted all the phone interviews herself and said many of the participants thanked her for simply listening.<\/p>\n

She can personally relate to many of their stories, especially those related to gender violence, racism, discrimination, and immigrant status.<\/p>\n

Chakraverty applied last year for two grants to fund this research \u2013 one from the university and one from the College of Education \u2013 and was so convinced she wouldn\u2019t receive them that she arranged to travel internationally during the summer. Two weeks before her travel, she was notified that she received both the grants concurrently.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did not believe it and was momentarily puzzled and confused,\u201d she recalled. \u201cI waited for them to tell me they made a mistake and when that email didn\u2019t come, I went ahead with my travel plans, but also started designing the survey, which I then launched in the fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Word of the survey was spread through the help of colleagues, conferences, and social media. Within months, Chakraverty ended up with respondents from 46 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

She used a combination of the two quantitative measurement scales for the imposter phenomenon developed in the 1980s to create the anonymous survey. Participants were also asked if they wanted to take part in a follow-up phone interview. Of those she interviewed, 80 percent were women, and about 20-25 percent were in the medical field.<\/p>\n

During the interviews, some talked about being rendered powerless after some incident they experienced as children, and how they recognized that their feelings of being disempowered as an adult \u2013 or feeling like an impostor \u2013 were rooted in childhood trauma.<\/p>\n

Some other findings from the study:<\/p>\n