I’m not an imposter… by ana~

I got an email this morning from someone working for MIT News. Someone at the OME⁠01 Office of Minority Education —likely my freshman year advisor⁠02 My senior year of high school, I applied to do Interphase EDGE, which is a 2-year enrichment program. The whole thing has a couple of parts: a class component the summer before freshman year, two years of workshops, trainings, and meetings with an assigned advisor at the OME, and a week-long retreat to reconnect with the OME. The advisor I talk about here, Somiya, was my secondary advisor my freshman year, but generally the first person I went to for help with anything. —recommended me to be a featured student on their homepage. I remember receiving the email from Dean Crayton asking me to write a bio application about it weeks ago, but I emailed her back pretty late and it wasn’t my best work.

Still, I’m going to be featured.

I’ve seen those features before and always wondered, what type of student do you need to be to get one? Those types of articles feel like a culmination of an MIT career. They were given to only the perfect students, with the ideal MIT lives.

There’s already a flaw in this reasoning, but we’ll get to it.

Here’s one tricky thing about being at MIT: you never know how you compare to anyone else directly.

I remember in high school, after every exam, people would be sharing point scores. I would keep a list in my head of everyone who had done better than me to see how I measured up. 

These days, I don’t share my exam scores with anyone, but also no one asks.

This was something that I remember being surprised by when I first got on campus. People here were always used to being the top of their classes in high school; I was worried about how horrible the competition would get, how intense exam cut offs would be.

What I learned during my summer of Interphase is that this isn’t the case. People ask “how’d the test go?” instead of “what’d you get?” and you never have to give a full answer. Most of these days when people ask me how an exam or a pset went I respond tacitly, “well, you know, it went.”

I don’t want to act like competition isn’t a part of MIT, but it’s different to how it was during high school. Competition here is more difficult for me to spot—in myself and others.

I remember, my freshman fall, feeling like I wasn’t doing all that much. I was tired, all the time, but wasn’t sure why or how to fix it. Here’s a list of things that I thought I’d done in the fall:

• Classes
  • 18.022, which I eventually dropped in favor of 18.02A
  • 8.01
  • 21W.013, a CI-HW which I didn’t want to take but I didn’t get a high enough score on the FEE
  • 3.091
  • 24.00 as a listener, but I stopped going to class one month in because it was too difficult to wake up in the morning
• No clubs or activities outside of Interphase.

Here’s the list of things I now realize I was doing:

• 4 MIT classes that are a supposed “average” course load, but which introduced a level of rigor that I’d never experienced in high school. 03 There are some people who say that their high school life was more difficult than college; that has never been my experience.
  • 18.022, which I eventually dropped in favor of 18.02A because the former had more prereqs than I’d realized. 04 It helps a lot if you’ve already taken multivariable calculus in high school.
  • 8.01, a requirement that I had a bit more experience in because of Interphase but that took a lot of time and energy since I kept convincing myself I was bad at physics.
  • 21W.013, which set up the way I wrote and approached essays for the rest of the year.
  • 3.091, a class which was fun, but time intensive because of the labs and additional projects besides psets.
  • Figure out how to exist, especially when doing a level of work that I used to complete by just overexerting myself. 
  • Learn, for the first time, how to recover from burnout.
• Try to figure out how to wake myself up in the mornings, a task that I had never succeeded at before. It’s hard to communicate just how distressing it was to realize I couldn’t wake up, no matter how many alarms I set or hours of sleep I got. Often I would wake up, check the hour, and cry.
• Figure out how to feed myself at regular times, especially when I often didn’t have company in the dining halls. Meals have always been a family affair for me, and I longed to eat with other people.
• Deal with being in an abusive relationship with a manipulative partner that took a lot of emotional energy. I was forced to:
  • Recover from the fallout of not having that many close friends, struggle to reconnect with my parents after hiding my relationship, and regain the ability to trust myself.
  • Make a new group of friends. I was sure, at the time, that everyone I knew from Interphase liked my ex more than me. I knew no one from back home.
  • Get used to feeling lonely; I ate greasy and unfamiliar food at Maseeh that upset my stomach because I didn’t want to tap into another dorm just to eat by myself.
• Work at Tech Calling, a job I hated, to try to make enough money to fly home that semester and be with my family again. Get verbally harassed by the people who pick up the phone because they don’t understand they’re talking to underpaid college students and not someone in a position of power at MIT. 05 I have a lot more fun stories from Tech Calling after my friend started working with me (we were awful at our jobs, but it was more fun). My freshman fall, though, I just cried after my shifts because I hated the tone in which alumni said my name.
• Figure out an entire new city, state, and environment away from my parents. 

The list continues, because there are always more things that I do than I give myself credit for. The point is: I was doing many, many things. A lot of these are particular to my experience, but they’re often more universal than you’d think. 

It’s been particularly strange talking with the sophomores in my sorority because I see just how much they’re doing without realizing. They handle relationships, homework, classes, family, and internships with more grace than I think I ever had. 06 Then again, they have my help so maybe I’ll take credit for this >:) It makes me wonder, did the upperclassmen struggle like I’ve been? How did I not notice it? And it makes me reflect even more on my past.

At the end of my freshman fall, I spiraled into burnout, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome. Back then, I called it failure. I had a conversation with two friends about how I felt like I wasn’t pushing myself the way I used to in high school. Where did all my goals and aspirations go? I’d always been the “driven” student in high school. 

With that in mind, I registered for four classes in the spring:

• 18.032⁠07 The more mathematically rigorous track for 18.03, recommends experience working with proofs and having taken an analysis class before. – Differential Equations
• 18.100B – Real Analysis
• 8.02 – Physics II
• 24.118 – Paradox and Infinity (my, still, favourite class at MIT)

I thought, surely, as a math major I should be able to take the “hard” track of two different math classes without too much of a problem. As long as I committed myself, I would be fine. 08 I was not fine.

My friend ended up convincing me to do 18.100A⁠09 Real analysis is offered in two courses: 18.100A and 18.100B. According to my friend (and my experience) 18.100A is a better introductory class, and covers more about how to write proofs to someone with no experience! They cover essentially the same topics, although I think 100B covers metric spaces while 100A doesn’t. Not sure if that’s still the case, though. instead because he knew I had never seen a math proof before. As a replacement, I decided to join more clubs. The first was The Tech,⁠10 I am still an editor to this day! which I joined under the Production department and the second was my sorority⁠11 I am currently one of two presidents! Freshman spring really determined what I would do with my time for the rest of my MIT career, I suppose. (Alpha Epsilon Phi).

My classes were immediately too much, but 18.032 didn’t have psets due until the second month so I scraped by for a while. One fortuitous day, after crying at office hours,⁠12 Freaked out my TA and everything. I didn’t remember the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and felt ashamed. I checked my phone to see an email from the OME saying that Let’s Chat 13 Short, confidential sessions with a counselor from Mental Health run by the OME. I want to say that it’s fate that I got that email at just the right time, but I know it’s not. Fate is always determined by the people that know more about what I need than I do, sometimes, particularly my advisor at the OME. was happening for the next hour, and to drop by for snacks and advice from MIT Medical counselors.

I sat down to talk to the counselor and told her that I was too stupid to be going to MIT but I wanted to try. I was so desperate to get her to tell me the secret to succeeding here—less sleep? less friends? less breaks?

She asked me why I was taking 18.032 to begin with, and I explained that I hadn’t done enough in my first semester. I was a math major; I should be able to do the problems.

She said, I see. Have you heard of perfectionism?

I said, You mean the thing you say in job interviews?

She told me, then, that it’s a very real condition where people hold unachievable expectations for themselves and then proceed to shame themselves for not meeting them.

That’s not me, I said, my expectations are reasonable.  14 My expectations were not reasonable.

There’s this joke that people make about imposter syndrome which you might have heard: “I’m not good enough to even have imposter syndrome.” 

Hm, now that I’ve written it, it’s not very funny, is it?
I didn’t get the joke back then either.

She nudged me a pamphlet and told me about a support group for people with perfectionist thinking. Even if I didn’t have perfectionism, she said, surely I still want to work on myself.

In retrospect, I realize what she was doing. The gentle nudge, the “even if you don’t…,” and the offer to help me write an email to my professor about making up work. It was all a ploy that played exactly into my perfectionist mindset.

I showed up to the first support group meeting. I walked out of the room with a binder on what perfectionist thinking looks like and a wriggling thought in my brain that maybe this could actually help me.

In writing this blog pot, I went back through the worksheets I filled out throughout the workshop. It’s interesting to me to reflect back on the things I still do, after three years of MIT, as well as the things I have gotten better at with practice.

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Model of Perfectionism:

I judge my self-worth largely by how well I can do things, the more the better. 15 Presently, I would cross out “the more the better.” It’s more important to me, now, to do things well than to do a lot of things.

Unrelenting standard:

If I don’t do the most that I possibly could have, I didn’t do enough.

Perfectionist Thinking / Cognitive Disorders:

• Black and white thinking; All or nothing thinking.
• Jumping to conclusions: (A) Mind reading – you assume that people are reacting negatively to you when there’s no definite evidence for this; (B) Fortune Telling – you arbitrarily predict things will turn out badly.
• Minimization⁠16 I still do this, though I try to catch myself in it. A classic “Ana-ism” is saying something like “Oh, I just write some things” instead of saying “I write a lot, and care deeply about writing.” It’s easy to mistake humility with minimization, but telling them apart has been crucial for me.
• Emotional Reasoning:⁠17 Don’t know if it’s the years of therapy or what but I’m much better at understanding why I feel a particular way. You reason from how you feel (i.e. “I don’t feel like doing this, so I’ll put it off.”)
• “Should” Statements:⁠18 This one is interesting to deal with from a philosophy major perspective. After all, I’ve written 5-10 page essays on what I should or should not do in a situation. The way I think about it now is by whether there is a reason (an actual one, not just a vibe or an intuition) that gives me a purpose for doing something. The statement then becomes “To advance my studies, I want to / find it necessary to take this class” rather than “I should take this class. You criticize yourself with “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts.” “Must,” “ought,” “have to” are similar offenders.

Perfectionism Behaviors:

• Procrastination
• Anxiety and Isolation
• Eating too much or not⁠19 I don’t do this at all anymore. I think I used to see eating as a reward for good behavior rather than something necessary for me to do (definitely a disordered behavior, not good to do). I’ve regularized my eating schedule a lot since Freshman year; switching off the meal plan helped a lot here. enough
• Overcompensating for mistakes and failures

Failure / Avoid Trying to Meet Standards:

• Guilt and shame
• Self reprimanding
• Reaffirming Standard

Meet Standard but… 

It must not have been that difficult.

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I’ve grown a lot since then, particularly in identifying where my feelings are coming from. 20 Maybe even a little too much for my own good, but that’s a post for later

One of the first assignments I got from the group was to note down every time I was procrastinating on something. When I came back the next session I told the counselor, I feel so bad, I think I actually procrastinated more this week than before.

She told me that I likely hadn’t actually procrastinated more—I just noticed that I was doing it. That’s the first step, she said, to being able to change an action or behavior.

I think one of the things I didn’t understand initially was how intermixed anxiety and procrastination are for me. We talked, in the workshop, about how procrastination is often a side effect of fear. I didn’t know what I was afraid of; I’m closer to figuring that out now.

I’m an immigrant. My parents had to work hard to raise me and my sister, do well in their jobs, and figure out a new country. None of those things left them a lot of time to relax. 

Once in second grade, I came back home in tears and told my mom I didn’t think I’d done enough for the assignment I had due. I got 100% when it was returned to me, but my mom still told me to work harder to feel satisfied with my work.

It’d be easy to blame my parents for my anxiety; I don’t. My mom and dad both worked constantly to get better lives—for themselves, but mostly for me and my sister. 

A couple of years ago, my dad worked in a different state, but commuted six hours every weekend so I could finish my last year without disruption when I was first applying to college. That final year was when I truly connected with my teachers; I can’t express how necessary I think it was to get into MIT.

So now, finally, I understand my parent’s mentality—if you don’t feel satisfied with your work, then work harder. 

Of course, this isn’t healthy or sustainable behavior. Understanding a mentality doesn’t mean agreeing⁠21 I say agreeing here as a sort of mixture of justifying, accepting, or promoting it. As in, I don’t think “work harder” is a good mentality to have, despite knowing where it comes from! with it. 

A couple of months ago, I was talking to my therapist. She told me, Ana, you’re running in a race, but the finish line keeps moving further and further away. What happens? Who’s moving the finish line?

It’s frustrating because I know what happens—burnout. And I know who’s causing it—me. But it can be so difficult, sometimes, to stop the thoughts from leaking out. 

I am a person who is always moving, from class to class, sorority event to club activity, meeting to more meetings. I timeblock, so often when I’m done with my week I look back and realize my days look something like this: 22 I include this as a general week, not because I think of it as an example, but to illustrate where my time usually goes. I think, actually, this was the last week I got fully through before burnout started kicking in.

Running, running, running, and I keep moving the finish line. 

Let me tell you about my burnout:

I stop feeling hungry—literally.
Food doesn’t have the same flavor when eating alone, and often everyone else is also busy. I don’t stop eating, but I stop seeing the point in it. 

I stop being able to respond to people as generously as I want to.
Sometimes, I get snappy and passive-aggressive, but often I just crawl into my bed to avoid thinking about the world. 

I skip classes to sleep, sometimes even when they have attendance policies.
I send messages saying I’m “existentially tired” and think about a line from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close that reads,

“I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through.”

I stop feeling hungry—metaphorically.
Readings in my philosophy classes that I would have spent hours pouring over no longer hold the same meaning to me.
I allow myself to slump into nihilism; I love the pressure it eases off of me, despite hating the lack of meaning to my actions. 

I stop listening to music. I stop writing. I stop dancing.

It was one of those burnt out weeks when I got the email from the OME asking if I wanted to submit a bio to be considered for an MIT News profile. It took more energy than I would have liked to submit the three sentence bio Dean Crayton wanted from me.

After sending that email, I layed in my bed with the body pillow my sister gifted me for my birthday, surrounded by decorations that remind me of how hard I worked to get to MIT, and felt hollowed out.

I wish I could give a cure-all solution for how to fix burnout, but I can’t. Recently, I’ve been feeling more emotional burnout than academic. I’ve been trying to carry too many things for too many friends, because saying “no” to listening to someone’s problems feels wrong. 

I’ve been better, lately. Let me tell you what’s helped.

• I accepted that I was going to submit an essay late. It’s not going to be my best work.
• I cleaned my room.
• I started washing my face again at night.
• I had a couple of exhausting conversations with friends that left me drained, but hopeful.
• I had dinner with Ruth.

I’ve already had my interview and photoshoot for this MIT News article. I spent hours before the interview wondering what they would even ask me, especially since it felt like I haven’t done anything truly remarkable. 

Ultimately, the interview ended up being about what the phrase “IHTFP” means to me and my path through MIT, fiddly as it’s been.

I wore my MIT Class of 2022 jacket to the photoshoot hoping it would make me feel more legitimate. Unfortunately, it was 40°F, so it mostly just made me feel cold. 

What does it mean to be the perfect MIT student? 

I told my interviewer, IHTFP, to me, means all of the feelings that I had my freshman fall. MIT is wonderful, and can make you feel like you’re on top of the world. But it can also make you feel tiny—insignificant. 

I’m not sure how to finish this blog post because I don’t feel like I’ve given any revolutionary information. Maybe, then, in the spirit of managing my perfectionism, I’ll set a loose (and realistic) goal. 

IHTFP. Let’s enjoy my last year of paradise.