‘Why do I feel so stupid in seminars?’

If you've decided to read this blog, maybe you feel a bit stupid in seminars too. I cannot reassure you that in your next seminar you will walk in impersonating that one guy you both resent and envy for speaking up confidently without a care in the world. Nevertheless, I hope that this blog post will at least help you reframe this feeling of stupidity we have all felt at some point, especially at the start of our academic journeys.

I don’t consider myself to be a shy person. In fact, I am the opposite. I love asking questions, have a tendency of oversharing and enjoy telling stories, often ‘inception’-style stories where I chat away and jump from topic to topic until I don’t even remember where the story started or what the point of it even was. In seminars though, I would often remain silent. It was not that I didn’t have things to say, but I felt such an overwhelming sense of insecurity, of fear that I would say something stupid, that I would stumble on my words and accidentally say something else, that I felt physically unable to say anything. By the time I had carefully crafted in my mind the best way of expressing whatever I wanted to say, it was too late. The topic had moved on, and I had remained silent.

It wasn’t until years later when I started my PhD in Glasgow that I first heard about ‘imposter syndrome’. Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities, in short, feeling like an imposter, like a fraud, like you’re not really meant to be in the environment you’re in, be it academic or professional.

When I moved to the UK to study a degree in Sociology, despite having been accepted and deserving to be there, I definitely felt imposter syndrome. Up until my degree, my education had been focused on the natural sciences. I had only written a handful of essays in Spanish in philosophy, so moving to the UK to study Sociology was both exciting and a bit terrifying. On the one hand, I was looking forward to finally discussing all kinds of interesting sociological and philosophical topics with likeminded people, or at least having the infrastructure to engage in those kinds of conversations. On the other hand, I felt like maybe I didn’t know enough, and while I might have felt confident explaining the process of photosynthesis, undermining the foundations of capitalism requires a different kind of argumentation, one I hadn’t practiced or felt confident in.

What I didn’t know at the time is that ‘knowing enough’ to contribute to a seminar discussion is very subjective and is therefore an arbitrary thing. When does anyone ever know enough? It wasn’t my lack of knowledge on a specific topic that was the problem (after all, I was studying a degree to gain knowledge on these topics), but my lack of confidence. I feared at the time that saying something ‘stupid’ or asking questions about issues I didn’t quite grasp, would make me seem ‘stupid’, even though I didn’t think I was, whereas if I said nothing, I was, in a way, safe from these judgements. “Maybe it’s also because English is my second language”, I would tell myself. “If I was back in Spain”, I thought, “I would definitely speak up, everything would be easier.” This thought gave me some comfort, until I joined a debating society with a Belgian friend and flatmate shortly after the start of the semester.

The point of the club was that it was open to everyone, it didn’t matter whether you were studying chemistry, molecular biology, business or linguistics, everyone was welcome to contribute. I thought that maybe in this informal setting I would feel more comfortable as I would not feel judged by the tutor or course mates, and most people attending did not even formally study anything we talked about.

I struggled to contribute here as well. Despite wanting to bring in my ideas to the debate, I often felt paralysed by fear of not being able to express myself. I would get really stressed with the prospect of saying anything and would try mentally formulating the best way to express an idea but by the time I was ready, it was again too late. Someone had already quickly responded to the remark, and I had remained silent.

This person quick to respond would often be my flatmate. He would make all kinds of interesting points, some of which I had thought of myself. And it was as if he talked without thinking about what he wanted to say first. He just talked. I admired the way he expressed his ideas with such eloquence, and I convinced myself that my contributions were unnecessary if he would tell them for me, in a more articulate way than I ever could. We went to these meetings every week, and I never said a thing. On the way back home from the meetings, I would frantically tell him all the ideas that had come to my mind throughout the discussion, and he would often respond with: “Why didn’t you say that before in the debate?” And I would shrug.

I didn’t reflect on this experience at the debating club until years later. At the time, I attributed my silence to shyness, ‘there were too many people there, I don’t speak English well enough, my eloquent friend was in a debating club in school, etc.’. We never spoke about the fact that out of 40 students engaging in these debates, I was the only female student there.

Of course, speaking English as a second language, not having a social sciences background, and my perfectionistic tendencies all contributed to me feeling this lack of confidence, feeling like an imposter. However, it wasn’t until way later that I realised that, along with the above factors, gender bias also played a significant part.

Research consistently suggests that while, yes, anyone can experience these feelings of self-doubt, they tend to show up more often in historically underrepresented groups such as women and people from BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) backgrounds. My imposter syndrome was exacerbated by the feeling of being an “only one” in a room, either the only international and/or female student. However, imposter syndrome seems to put the blame on individuals, without accounting for historical and cultural contexts. Tulshyan and Burey (2021) further note the impact of systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases, were categorically absent when the concept of imposter syndrome was developed in the late 70s.

Recent research (Carter et al., 2018) on question-asking behaviour of over 600 academics at seminars in over 20 countries finds that men are > 2.5 times more likely to ask questions. Though the study doesn’t factor in important intersectional dynamics, these findings among others, show the value of understanding our seminar experiences in their wider sociocultural context. Reflecting on how these dynamics played out in my experiences at university was immensely relieving, as I understand now that at times, the impostor syndrome I experienced, was not just a personal issue, but a public one too.

Since then, I have become more aware of these behavioural and structural patterns, and when I started teaching at Glasgow over two years ago, I thought about ways in which to encourage seminar participation. Last year, I conducted a short survey on my first seminar to try to capture, first, what aspects of tutorials my students were most worried about (left word cloud), and second, what aspects they were looking forward to the most (right word cloud).

The overlap is almost comical. While most students feel worried and anxious about speaking out, not understanding, lacking confidence, the aspects they most look forward to are hearing other people’s opinions, talking, discussions, sharing ideas and people. Understanding that most of your course mates also feel self-doubt is important, because it further shows that these experiences, whilst felt in a very personal way, are also shared. It moves the issue from the private to the public sphere, from narratives around self-confidence to discussions around sense of community and inclusion.

Sources

Carter, A. J., Croft, A., Lukas, D., & Sandstrom, G. M. (2018). Women’s visibility in academic seminars: Women ask fewer questions than men. PloS one, 13(9), e0202743.

Tulshyan, R., & Burey, J.-A. (2021). Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2021/02/stop-telling-women-they-have-imposter-syndrome#:~:text=Imposter%20syndrome%20is%20loosely%20defined,they're%20deserving%20of%20accolades

Written by Ana Alonso Curbelo, GTA for LEADS