Having email exchanges with kids who are on their way to the GSB is a special delight for me because it takes me all the way back to 2003 when the GSB was only a dream that I never thought could become reality. Emails like the one below are a major part of why I’m still doing this blog after all of these years.
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SN wrote:
Dear Marquis,
Hi! I am “SN” from Mumbai, a recent Mechanical Engineering graduate. I will be joining Stanford GSB in 2016 as a deferred admit… Your blog has helped me immensely in developing a better picture of what I will be up against in the next few years.
I was reading your article titled ‘It’s amazing what one can learn in 10 years’ and saw that you dealt with and overcame ‘Impostor Syndrome’ in the past. I believe I am struggling with the same problem and it is affecting my efforts to prepare for the upcoming interview.
First, some background:
I come from a family with a humble history. My father came to Mumbai from a village at the age of 15 to work on a train ticket he had to borrow money for. Since then he has had a long journey rife with struggle to what he is today and is the proud owner of a retail showroom. My circle of friends and family are not at all in touch with organized business however and to me, the professional world of business is very new and a little scary since I have literally nobody to fall back on or ask for advice/guidance. Education isn’t exactly prized in my community and few know why Stanford is better than an IIM (some don’t even know what is ‘Stanford’).
I was not planning on applying to Stanford despite my high academic scores and plenty of leadership activities simply because I felt I belonged to a microcosm that was one notch removed from the kind of backgrounds I would expect a Stanford student to come from (It was my father that nudged me to fill that form). It did not help that whatever understanding I had of a ‘Stanford student’ came from webpages and forum discussions alone.
It has been almost a month since I received the news of my admission and despite the obvious connect between my academic/co-curricular achievements and the Stanford admit, my brain just cannot internalize the truth. Self-doubt like I have never known threatens to paralyze and liquidate the little motivation I had the audacity to muster for a future I did not expect must less planned for. I am unable to feel the happiness I know I deserve. Cognitive Dissonance is up-ending my efforts to plan my future and work for it in a meaningful way.
I know you are a busy man and time is a precious commodity, and therefore please accept my sincere thanks for having reached this far into my email. You are the only person that seems to be in a position to give me some practical help in this matter. Please advise as to how to deal with this problem.
Thanking you,
Yours truly,
SN
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My response:
SN,
Thanks for reaching out to me with this email. I should start by saying CONGRATULATIONS ON GAINING ADMISSION TO STANFORD GSB!!! You probably already know this, but being admitted to Stanford is one of the toughest tasks in the MBA world and being allowed to do a deferred admission is even more rare.
Now that you’ve set yourself up like this for the start of your career, you will be on a whole different path than your peers. I hope that you’ve taken time to give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done. But, based on your email, I have a feeling that you’ve been worrying so much that you haven’t done so. Hopefully, my words here will help you out of that situation.
As I read through your email, I couldn’t help but shake my head because I have felt many of the experiences and concerns that you described. Of course, the backgrounds for the stories are very different (you being in Mumbai and me being in a small rural town in Virginia), but the thoughts, fears, and counts are very similar. I thank God every day that He allowed me to learn about Imposter Syndrome during “Touchy Feely” during my second year at the GSB because, until that time, I felt like I was trapped in a box and, despite all that I’d accomplished, I was never willing to give myself credit for actually being capable of doing decent, much less great things, in my life.
Fortunately, you’ve learned about the Imposter Syndrome concept much earlier than I did through my blog post, so you have a chance to address it in the years leading up to business school, which will make a world of difference. The following are a few thoughts that I think will be helpful to you as you embrace the feelings that you’re having and work to address them in the coming years: —
- The first step in dealing with Imposter Syndrome is to understand the foundation of why one feels like he/she will be “found out” and come to terms with it. Is the issue that you don’t think you’re smart enough? Not talented enough? Come from too humble of a background? Not as effective as your peers? The key is to figure out what things that you fear may be revealed at some point and, once identified, you can work addressing those concerns. Let’s use your Stanford GSB admission as an example. If Stanford GSB thinks that you’re one of the best MBA applicants from this year, then you must be, right? Its Admissions Office gets thousands of applications each year and you were fortunate enough to get one of the few acceptance letters, so there has to be something that made your profile stand out. You need to find a way to trust that the judgment of others in cases like this and believe them when they say that you’re great. There may be underlying issues that would impact the way that YOU view yourself, but, when it comes to how others see you, take them at their word and push yourself to understand why they view you in such a way. Why doubt them?
- After you start buying into what others think, it’s time for you to start seeing it within yourself. It may sound basic as a 1-sentence line, but, in practice, it’s actually pretty challenging. The whole idea behind impostor syndrome is that a person isn’t willing/able to see his/her own strengths, so totally reversing that can take a lot of work. There is no surefire way to do it, but there are several different methods that one can take. For me, I basically used logic to convince myself to start truly believing (without any doubt) that I was awesome. In my mind, if people who were really smart and accomplished along with institutions (like Princeton and Stanford) that evaluate thousands of candidates each year all saw me as someone who was smart and had a lot to offer, then who was I to not think the same thing? Those people and institutions had a sample size of thousands and, when I was looking at myself, I only had a sample size of one. As I learned in Statistics class, the Law of Large Numbers dictates that, as a sample size grows, its mean with get closer to the average of an entire population. So, if these people/institutions that are at the top of business world considered me to be great, then I could sort of extrapolate that I’d likely be considered great by a big chunk of the rest of that population too. That revelation was like a slap in the face that woke me up from a bad dream. Ever since I made the decision to look at myself differently, my entire view of the world and my place in it changed for the better. The same thing can happen for you…you just have to figure out the approach that works best for you, your personality, and what is most comfortable.
- Once you start believing in your capabilities and value-add, you should let that belief start impacting the way that you interact with people and present yourself. Based on my own experience, I have a suspicion that folks with imposter syndrome tend to shy away from attention, downplay their accomplishments and capabilities, and speak/act as if they are a step behind their peers. If these behaviors are things that you do, you HAVE to find a way to stop them because they will not only negatively affect your ability to perform to your potential, but also portray you as someone who lacks confidence, which will in turn make other people doubt your capabilities. Of course, it is up to you to determine how this would change the way that you act and show yourself to the world because you have to be comfortable with it. In my case, I simply make it known to everyone that I truly believe myself to be amazing. In my view, it is a completely honest statement and, if anyone challenges it, I have 36 years worth of accomplishments to back up my claim. Now, this approach fits well with my personality, so it may not work with yours. You have to figure out what will blend best with the person that you are. Just know that, once you’ve conquered Imposter Syndrome, your view of the world and your actions will necessarily change…I don’t believe that there’s any way to avoid it.
- No matter what happens with the BCG interview, please remember that everything is going to be alright. When it comes to opportunities to join major companies like this, it can feel like everything in the world hinges on you successfully getting that job offer. Trust me when I say that it doesn’t. If you look back at my old blog entries from early 2005, you’ll see many stories about my struggles with getting a summer internship in management consulting. It got so bad that I came out of the on-campus recruiting process with 12 firms without a single offer. At that point, I felt like my career was over, but I soon realized that there are always other opportunities out there that can set you up better than the one that you’re targeting at a given point in time. In addition, putting too much pressure on yourself can have the reverse outcome of making you become overly stressed and unable to focus to perform at your beat (check out my blog entry on that: https://marquisparker.com/2009/04/never-get-too-busy-making-living-that/). If you recognize that you’re a great young candidate regardless of what happens in any given interview, it will be easier to take a carefree approach to the entire process and perform at your best. Don’t worry so much about things that you make it impossible to perform as well as you possibly can.
I know that the list above is relatively short, but that is by design. Since graduating from the GSB 8 years ago, I’ve learned that the easiest way to deal with problems that seem monstrous is to look at them as if they’re basic. I’ve found that this is the only way to keep myself from over thinking things and allowing myself to get trapped by a collection of what-ifs, i-can’t-do-thats, and this-is-too-difficults. Keeping things to a manageable list of items to address makes it easier to actually conquer the overall problem.
Well, that’s about all that I have for you right now. I hope that my comments above make sense and are helpful to you. Just remember that you’ve already accomplished a lot by being admitted to the GSB and, no matter what happens, you’re going to well in your career and life overall. You are set up to win BIG!
Take care and have a nice evening.
Marquis
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