I recall in year 1999, probably in that fall, once I met a gentleman who is the founder and president of a small IT outsourcing shop based in Peoria, IL. He was coming to Rolla to interview students for potential positions at his company. His questions are more interesting, I vaguely recall both he and I attended pretty good engineering schools in India and China respectively, but we didn’t attend most prestigious engineering schools such as IIT or Tsinghua University. He asked: do you feel you are inferior to the Stanford graduates? I said no and he agreed. He emphasized this point a bit: and the usual external perception and internal confidence comes with a degree from a prestigious university.
I have seen this phenomenon many times over the years. For example, in the IT/software industry, many people didn’t have formal education in computer science or computer engineering, and some of them will feel they are imposters or feel they are not qualified or confident. In fact my wife will joke with me re: this a lot. My degree is in mechanical engineering. I recall that gentleman I mentioned above majored in ME in college too. But we don’t need to feel that way. Formal college education is nice. At the same time we can leverage what we learned in our formal education, some overlaps with computer science and engineering; plus we pick up or learn from work, in the end we can do our job well and gain new knowledge and experience too.
This is applicable to other fields too. For example, I noticed a girl who didn’t take the traditional route of a singer or musician, in the end got a master’s degree in composition and in my opinion did quite well in her music (and creator) career. She also joked she is 野路子。That’s also one reason I wrote this post. In my opinion everyone is 野路子 – even those who went through all the so-called formal training. Because in today’s day and age, one has to learn or pick up whatever needed and not necessarily taught at school. Improvise. Adapt. Somewhat like the improvisation in jazz. It’s not easy as I observe last year my old daughter was so nervous when she was told she needs to improvise on vibraphone in suburban jazz band concert. In the end she did okay.
PS:
I wrote the above fairly quickly in early morning, on my phone. I just realized that my better half (my wife), though sometimes she jokes that I am not Comp Sci major, has similar doubts about herself in terms of career. She is a quite shy and self-conscious person, so I won’t dig deep in it if I could.
Reference:
Is Impostor Syndrome Holding You Back From Living Your Best Life? (VeryWellMind)