What is Imposter Syndrome?
Imposter Syndrome is when you are surrounded by people who you believe are better than you and have the feeling of not belonging
I believe that for a lot of people look at things this way to find an excuse to quit
Solution
If you are one of the people who view situations this way I would like to show you my perspective for this kind of situations
I myself am not perfect or the smartest human being out there, in fact I consider myself to be “below average” in a lot of basics of life. Although, when I see people who I am working with who are A LOT smarter than me I don’t view it as not belonging I view it as an opportunity. These people are living breathing examples of people who are at the level that I want to be at.
I can use this opportunity to befriend these people, learn from them, emulate them. I believe in the concept of your personality reflecting the 5 people you spend time with the most
People often respond to this with, what if they don’t want me around them. To answer this question, if they don’t want to help someone who’s willing to put the time and effort to learn then these are probably not the people you want to work or be influenced by anyway. Congrats you did yourself a favor and now you know!
People often say to this, BUT IT’S EMBARRASSING TO BE REJECTED
I ask myself, what’s the worst that can happen, worst case you get laughed at for a couple minutes people forget about it after an hour everything’s back to normal. Has your life been impacted significantly? No, it’s only your ego.
You cannot always go on in life only hoping for a yes, you have to know how to handle rejections and figure out a way to move forward.
Example
If you have already gotten over your Imposter Syndrome, I congratulate you, best of luck on your journey.
If not I will provide you with an example where this strategy did in fact work for me.
At Hack The Valley 7 I met Steven Gong and Jay Zhou, where we teamed up to make a project. For context at the time of HTV 7 (October 14 - 16, 2022) I had just entered my junior year of high school while Steven was a 2nd year Software Engineering student at University of Waterloo and Jay was a 3rd year Computer Science student at University of Waterloo.
I was inexperienced compared to them all right, I couldn’t do much I had no experience in OpenCV where Steven took the lead, I had no experience in making the tkinter GUI where Jay took the lead. All I could do was record input in Python (which I was not the best at at the time) and figure out how to connect the application to MongoDB.
Although, I viewed this as an opportunity to learn from these people as if you refer to Grade 12 the goal for me is to attend University of Waterloo as a Software Engineering student.
I learned from Steven (the weekend of the hackathon):
- How to take conceptual notes on Obsidian
- How to use OpenCV
- Work ethic
- More unique ways to view things in life
I learned from Jay (the weekend of the hackathon):
- Being a good friend
- Remembering your past connections (I met him at Hack the North but I forgot who he was lol)
- How to use tkinter
We ended up winning Hack The Valley 7 for the best “Gaming Related Hack”, and I am friends with Steven and Jay to this day.
If a 16 year old who goes to a normal high school can interact with people with the intention of learning from them. Then why can’t you?
Maybe your situation is different but I believe the same logic applies! Good luck!