October 1, 2025 | GradWell Season 2 View transcript ⚠️ JavaScript is required to view the podcast player. Give this episode a listen and let us know what you think! Follow GradWell and join us on our journey to greater well-being for graduate students at the University of Michigan. Guest Danielle Rosenscruggs is a Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the impostor phenomenon in higher education, with a particular interest in applied strategies to support the mental well-being of doctoral students. For her dissertation, she designed and piloted a multi-week intervention for U-M doctoral students in partnership with Rackham Graduate School, integrating cognitive reframing, mindfulness, and self-compassion practices. Danielle is the founder of the Impostor Academy, an independent consulting business that offers research-informed workshops, talks, and strategic support to individuals and institutions seeking to understand and address impostorism. She also facilitates Rackham’s impostorism workshops, has served as a wellness coach with Wolverine Wellness, and mentors both undergraduate and graduate students. Resources Michigan-based Rackham Impostorism Workshop – available a few times a year – search Happening @ Michigan for its next occurrence Email us for the Companion Workbook for Impostorism Workshop Research-based Strategies for Combatting the Impostor Phenomenon in Higher Education CAPS Counselor Embedded at Rackham CAPS Counselors Embedded in Michigan’s Schools and Colleges Wellness Coaches Outside the University The Impostor Academy Transcript Sam Hobson: Hey, welcome to GradWell, a limited series podcast that explores various ways the University of Michigan can support its graduate students and their journey to greater well-being in our everyday lives. Brought to you by Rackham Graduate School. This season we’ll be talking to members of our academic community whose research intersects various dimensions of well-being. I’m Sam Hobson, a PhD candidate and a GSSA in Rackham’s Professional Development and Engagement Office. My fellow grad students, it’s time we start placing as much importance on ourselves as we do our work. You’re worth the effort. Danielle Rosenscruggs: There’s no such thing as an impostor in grad school. There’s just not. Sam Hobson: Hello. Hello. Today’s resource is Danielle Rosenscruggs, a PhD candidate in developmental psychology. We’re going to be highlighting Danielle’s work on the impostor phenomenon in higher education. Today’s episode is the first of a two-part segment on the Impostor Phenomenon, where we’ll be digging deep into the intersection of the professional and intellectual dimensions of well-being. I am super excited to have y’all with Danielle and me today. Let’s get started. Danielle Rosenscruggs is a PhD candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the impostor phenomenon in higher education with a particular interest in applied strategies to support the mental well-being of doctoral students. For her dissertation, she designed and piloted a multi-week intervention for Michigan doctoral students in partnership with Rackham Graduate School, integrating cognitive reframing, mindfulness and self-compassion practices. Danielle is the founder of the Impostor Academy, an independent consulting business that offers research-informed workshops, talks and strategic support to individuals and institutions seeking to understand and address impostorism. She also facilitates Rackham’s Impostorism Workshops, has worked as a wellness coach with Wolverine Wellness, and mentors both undergraduate and graduate students. Hi, Danielle. Thank you for being here today. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Sam Hobson: Before we get started, just so that we’re all on the same page, what is the impostor phenomenon, and how does it relate to the impostor syndrome? Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. That’s a great question. So, impostor phenomenon is the original term. So, it was coined in the 1970s by doctors Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. It describes basically the experience of feeling like a fraud, so doubting your abilities, fearing that others will find out that you’re not truly competent, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, and that’s the important part here. So, a lot of people experiencing it will often dismiss their successes. For example, maybe attributing it to luck or timing or external factors rather than their own skills or abilities. And the impostor syndrome, which I’ll put in big quotes, impostor syndrome, that became popular later. So, that was really when the popular media started picking it up when you started to have a lot of pop psych books and articles and self-help things written about it, but it was never meant to be a clinical diagnosis. So, calling it a syndrome can be really misleading because that can really pathologize what’s often a really normative response to certain high-pressure environments or environments where we are receiving implicit or sometimes explicit messages that we don’t belong or that these environments were not made for us. So, that’s why a lot of scholars in the academic side, including Pauline Clance, push back against the idea of labeling it as a syndrome, because it really suggests that the problem is at the individual level when in reality it’s more about being embedded in certain social contexts, about how our identities are viewed or treated in those contexts. And again, this normative response to that experience. So, in my scholarship, and again, many of us in the academic space, we try to be really intentional about calling it impostor phenomenon so that we can keep the focus on this broader experience and the social context of it rather than pathologizing and focusing on the idea of it being something wrong with how you are thinking or how you are feeling. But when folks hear impostor phenomenon or impostor syndrome, either in academic literature or in the popular press, they’re basically talking about the same thing. Sam Hobson: Okay. So, impostor syndrome places the onus on the individual. But if we understand impostorism as a phenomenon, then we provide it with more structural, more cultural foundation, and therefore something to address at that level rather than somebody has to fix something within themselves. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. And again, syndrome really evokes this idea of a diagnosis. This isn’t something in the DSM. This isn’t something that you can be diagnosed with by a therapist. It’s not something wrong with you. Yeah. It’s more, again, describing thoughts and feelings and reactions to things in your environment that, again, may be grounded in your own personal experience, but unlike things like depression or anxiety that are, again, clinical diagnoses, this is not that. Which is, again, why I grimace at the word syndrome often. Sam Hobson: Understood. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. Sam Hobson: So, how does the impostor phenomenon relate to professional and intellectual well-being? Danielle Rosenscruggs: I think especially in a high-achieving environment. So, if we’re talking about grad school for instance, it can really serve as a barrier to development, again, either in academic training or professional training, which then I think has a huge impact on our well-being. Because it can stop us from being open to opportunities, it can stop us being open to feedback, which is incredibly important. And it is often tied to negative self-talk or being self-critical, which then, as I’m sure lots of us can relate to, can really spiral and open the floodgates to having blinders on about our experiences compared to those around us. So, in academic spaces and in professional spaces, it basically allows us to get in our own way and allow the stories that we’re telling ourselves about how we don’t belong or we’re not good enough or we’re faking our way through to really prevent us from fully engaging with the opportunities around us. Sam Hobson: What I’m hearing is that it stops us from our forward momentum. You said that it keeps us from being able to hear feedback and receive it while it keeps us from going after opportunities that we are incredibly qualified for it, keeps us from showing up in spaces in the ways that we need to do. And so, you phrased it as a barrier. I’m thinking of it as it’s like the raising of a boundary that keeps us from crossing over into a space where our professional and intellectual abundance lives. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. I think that’s a great way to capture what I just said. I think, again, a lot of it is rooted in fear. So, when we think about the impostor phenomenon, it’s not just feeling like a fraud, it’s feeling like a fraud and then being afraid that other people are going to see that fraudulence. And so, then what we do, all of our energy and our thoughts and our actions are put into how do we make sure nobody sees it? How do we make sure that we aren’t being exposed? And when we’re focusing on that, we’re not focusing on how do I take advantage of the opportunities around me? How do I go after learning opportunities? How do I take on new projects that will help me expand and grow and thrive in this field that I’m really passionate about, right? None of us are here without passion. It takes too much work and energy to sustain this without some kind of passion, at least at the beginning. So, if we’re so busy being focused on how do we not get exposed, how do I trick everyone into thinking that I’m smart enough to be here, we just really can’t engage with that. So, we’re handcuffing ourselves. We’re limiting ourselves out of this survival fear mentality that naturally is the opposite of thriving and expanding and being open. And again, back to the critical feedback that is so important to academic and professional development, it makes us so vulnerable to those kinds of thoughts because we see any kind of critical feedback as validation that, “Yes, see, I don’t belong here. Yes, see, I’m not smart enough. Yes, see, I am not good enough.” We see it as validation and not as the opportunities to identify where we need to learn and grow and expand. So, it’s this nesting doll of fears and maladaptive strategies that don’t allow us to see what’s in front of us and see what’s inside of us, and really get what we can out of our training and then our professional development. Sam Hobson: That is fascinating. I didn’t realize that it was a multi-piece experience, that it’s not just the experience of feeling fraudulent. But also to experience impostor phenomenon or impostorism requires that there’s fear on top of this feeling of fraudulence and also this fear that then immobilizes you or causes you to redirect your energy, like you said, into making sure that nobody ever experiences your experience of feeling fraudulent. And that feels incredibly exhausting, and also it feels like really cyclical. So, I feel fraudulent. I experience this fear and I don’t want anybody to know. And so, I engage in all of these behaviors to keep myself from it. And so, then if I get any type of feedback that I can shape to affirm this perspective that I have, then it will support my feelings of fraudulence, well then, which will support my fear that nobody can find out about this with, but then I dig deeper into these behaviors. That sounds so exhausting. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting because we end up doing these cognitive gymnastic moves, right, to always be looking for evidence to reaffirm the fraudulence while always discounting the evidence of belonging or the evidence of achievement. Or it’s so common for a lot of folks that they get into their grad programs and they’re like, “Oh, I must have gotten in by mistake.” Anyone who has ever served on an admissions committee, which I have had the joy of doing as a senior grad student now, nobody gets in by mistake. It’s just not possible. And it also speaks to one of the paradoxes of the impostor phenomenon, which I find fascinating, which is we have this mindset that I’m not good enough to be here. I don’t belong. I’m not smart enough. I’m a fraud. I’m faking it. I’m tricking everyone around me. Which means that everyone around you is so easily fooled. Because even if you are, let’s say a master at fraudulent, you are an expert. You can trick the best of them. If we, again, think about grad school, what we’re saying as a novice academic, “I am so skilled at fooling these 30-year tenured professors into thinking that I am smart, but also thinking that I am not smart enough to do anything.” So, it’s this weird paradox that either “I am so brilliant that they can’t see that I am not smart,” or “They are so dumb that I can easily fool them as a fraud.” So, a lot of what it comes down to is really recognizing these cognitive distortions. We are not seeing things clearly and accurately when we convince ourselves that we are frauds, that we convince ourselves that we fooled our way in, that we are faking our way through. That’s just not possible in these really competitive, high-achieving, high-stress environments. There are so many gates you had to get through to get into this room, it’s just so improbable. So, part of it is just having to step back and recognize that we don’t have this clear view of ourselves, and that that is, as I said earlier, getting in our way. Sam Hobson: Have you found that folks are confident in their ability to fool others? So, we’re not confident in our ability to show up as academics in this space. Do people feel confident in their ability to fool others or do they also feel fraudulent in that aspect as well? Danielle Rosenscruggs: I think that they feel confident in the sense that they have to feel confident about it because that’s the way that they justify that they’ve been able to succeed. So, I am still here because I’m continuously able to fool everybody, which requires a certain amount of acknowledgement that I am then succeeding at fooling everybody. But again, because this is built on a house of cards that is built on a foundation of just self-criticism and self-doubt, they’re always afraid that it is a skill that they are about to run out of. So, I’ve been able to do it up until this point. But I can’t, the next time I won’t be able to do it. I was able to do it on this paper, but on the next paper, they’re going to figure out that I don’t know what I’m doing. So, again, this is where we get back to these paradoxes where they are simultaneously telling themselves, “I have been so good at faking it this whole way through to get this far, but this is the end of my ability to fake it. I’m going to be found out any moment”. And again, that’s where this exhaustive cycle that you talk about, and actually there’s something in impostorism and called the impostor cycle, that we get stuck in because we’re just constantly being fueled by this fear that any day now, any moment now is when my con is going to be exposed and folks are going to see that I don’t really belong. I’m not really smart enough. I don’t actually deserve to be here. Sam Hobson: Danielle, this is fascinating. This seems like if not a conscious or active, it seems like we’re making a choice because we could be receiving this feedback and frame it in a different way. But we seem to collectively be framing the fact that I’m doing well in graduate school as a reflection of my ability to fool people rather than the reflection of my ability to do well in graduate school. Why is this happening on a collective level? Why are we making these choices in how we frame our experiences? Danielle Rosenscruggs: So, I’m going to speak from my personal perspective on this. My personal professional perspective informed by reading. But what I’m about to say is not empirically validated. This is what I think is happening based on everything I know in my own scholarship and what I’ve read. I think especially when we’re talking about in the context of the US and US academic spaces, which is all I feel comfortable speaking to because that’s where my scholarship resides. We have all been socialized through our early development as humans, not just in the context of students, but then later as students, that humility is very important and that the worst thing you can be is arrogant and egotistical or a know it all. We have these ideas that humble knowledge is very important. But I think along the way, something has happened culturally where what that actually translates to and how it manifests is that we are constantly checking ourselves. So, we’re constantly, “Yes, I achieve this, but I’m not smarter than anybody else. Yes, I achieved this, but I had to work really hard or I had access to these other opportunities. I had access to this privilege. I had access to all of these things that weren’t just me. So, it’s not just because I’m talented, it’s not just because I’m skilled. It’s not just because I’m smart. It’s because I was in the right place at the right time. It’s because somebody did me a favor. It’s because I had a really good letter of recommendation.” Right? And so, this aim towards humility, I believe has just swung too far into demonizing any positive or self-congratulatory talk thinking that if I think, “Wow. I worked really hard and I have a certain level of intelligence, and I did have connections and different opportunities, and that together is what led me here,” that we think that that is the gateway drug to arrogance and being full of ourselves. And so, I think a lot of it is the socialization of don’t be too proud and don’t be bragging and stay humble. So, I think that primed us all to, instead of having the gateway into being an egomaniac, we instead followed the door into self-criticism and self-doubt, thinking that we weren’t ever good enough. Even folks who maybe grew up in spaces where they were expected to be smart and they were expected to achieve, they also sometimes receive a lot of messages about like, “Oh, yeah. Of course, you got an A. You’re so smart. Of course you did well. You were supposed to do well.” Sam Hobson: So it’s your abilities. Danielle Rosenscruggs: So, no one really gets the praise. And Clance and Imes, their original work, they actually looked into really early development and parenting styles and those types of things as a thought of that’s where these thoughts originated and the early seeds were planted. I also think that it is amplified by social media. I think we see pushback when people are too proud of their achievements. We see the comments, we see people saying negative things about them. And we, again, raise up as this archetype, this humble achiever who gets there by hard work and doesn’t need the recognition, and doesn’t need the congratulations and doesn’t need accolades, and they’re just doing it for the sake of the work. All of these things just in concert, I think, create the opportunity for self-doubt and self-criticism to grow because we are so afraid of swinging the other way. And I think that that’s a shame because I think for a lot of people, it would take a lot for them to swing to the other extreme. But because our culture loves to focus on what’s wrong and what we’re not good enough for and what we need to be better at, I think it’s so much easier for us to swing into this really negative self-talk, self-doubt arena. And it makes me sad because most of us are surrounded by brilliant people. Our peers were, I mean, again, brilliant, passionate scholars who just can’t internalize their achievements and everything that they’re doing, interpreting. And I think that that’s a shame. Sam Hobson: Me too. Me too. It seems like, as a culture, it’s not acceptable to be confident, and I can imagine how that can play out differently with people from different backgrounds, different genders, different ethnicities, different nationalities. And I know I’ll be speaking more with your colleague, Dianna, next episode, and we’ll go a little deeper into that. But to have this foundation- Danielle Rosenscruggs: Also, a brilliant scholar. Sam Hobson: Yes, yes. But to have this foundation of there is this cultural expectation that we are playing into by … not abiding by, but by accepting impostorism within ourselves is wild and not something I had realized. So, yeah. Thank you. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. Sam Hobson: Danielle, take a step back, because I know we never even talked about it. Why do you study the impostor phenomenon? Danielle Rosenscruggs: Like many people, I came to my focus because I felt personally connected to it. So, I know me-search is often said as a negative thing. Historically, I think in psychology in particular me-search, the idea of being attracted to something because you personally resonate with it was always a bad thing. But I think it’s great. I think it brings a certain level of humanity and perspective to the experience. Sam Hobson: Yes. Danielle Rosenscruggs: In my first couple of years, I started to feel like an impostor. I didn’t know what the impostor phenomenon was. I just constantly felt like, “What am I doing here?” I was a non-traditional, or I am, I guess, still a non-traditional student in the sense that I was much older. So, I started grad school in my late 30s, which at least at our program, at our university, that made me very old. So, I was about eight years older than the people who called themselves old students. I was older than some of the faculty. It was very obvious to me that I was different. And as many people experienced the feeling of different, that made me feel like then different meant I didn’t belong. When I submitted my application, I turned to my husband and said, “We just made a donation to the University of Michigan.” When I got my invitation to interview, I showed it to my husband again, and I said, “If nothing else, I can always tell people I got an interview at Michigan.” So, my whole path into Michigan was laden with self-doubt. I never thought I belonged here. Even when I told people that I got into Michigan, they said, “Oh, you mean Michigan State?” Which nothing wrong with Michigan State at all. But I was like, “No. Michigan.” So, I felt like I was receiving messages from other people that they couldn’t even believe that I got in. So, from the start, I just saw everything that I struggled with as evidence. Again, stats isn’t my big strength. So, when I struggled in my stat series, I was like, “See, I don’t belong here.” When I struggled in my feminist theory class that I took, which I had never taken a feminist theory class in my life, and then I took a grad level one. So, of course, I struggled in it. But I was like, “See, I don’t belong here.” When I was trying to get through all the academic readings, which I had never done in my life, and I was having a hard time, I said, “See, this is proof I don’t belong here.” Meanwhile, I started my program in fall 2020. So, there were other things happening in the world that also made things hard. So, all of those experiences, I was collecting evidence without realizing it. I was maintaining a list in my head of all the reasons why I shouldn’t be here, of all the reasons why I didn’t fit. And I don’t actually remember how I learned about the impostor phenomenon. Maybe it was just through social media or something. But I learned about it. It immediately resonated with me. And as soon as I became a candidate, I switched my whole research portfolio. Sam Hobson: Thank you so much for sharing your journey that I feel like relates and resonates with a lot of our journeys as well. And so, that leads me to my next question, which is that in our earlier conversations, you have said that impostor feelings can be a normal response to doctoral training. Why is that? Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. So, doctoral training has a lot of really prime opportunities for impostorism to flourish. So, first, you’re taking folks who probably are used to doing very well. So, most people who get into doctoral programs, particularly funded doctoral programs, which tend to be more competitive, they probably have been very successful in earlier academic endeavors. So, you have folks that maybe things came easily to them or they understood how things worked, what the formula was. “I put in X amount of work. I get an A on the other side of it.” So, you have those folks coming in. But then when you get to doctoral training, even though it’s nested within higher ed, even though we’re in academic departments, it is very, very different from undergrad and even master’s training. And the reason is because undergrad and even some master’s programs are really focused on learning. So, you are being taught some information. You’re being told what other people have said, what other people have found, and you need to internalize that information and maybe synthesize it. Whereas in doctoral training, you are expected to generate that knowledge to generate the information. And so, even though you’re still wearing this student hat, you’re not really a student. You have things to learn. So, in that way, you are a student, but you are not given as clear of an equation. You’re not told do X, Y, Z specifically, and then you will succeed. We know we have to finish our 619 or Master’s thesis, and it was called in some other programs, we have to finish a dissertation. But how do you do that? There’s not really a … Sam Hobson: Who knows? Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. I still don’t know. I’m halfway through dissertating and who knows how to do that. And so, you get introduced a lot of ambiguity, which a lot of people feel vulnerable dealing with. They don’t know exactly what the rules are. So, that introduces some questions and self-doubt. But you’re also being told that you are going to be the expert. Whatever topic you pick, whatever thing you focus on, you are going to be one of the world’s leading experts in this topic. And whoo, that’s a lot of pressure, right? But in reality, doctoral education is not to become the expert in your topic. Doctoral education is about getting trained in how to do the work you need to do to eventually become the expert. So, we aren’t actually expected to at the end of our five, six, seven, whatever year program you’re in. I know humanities tends to go longer, for example. You’re not actually the expert when you finish that. You are just getting your seal of approval that says you have been trained in how to do research and how to be a scholar, and now go off and spend your next decades becoming that expert, refining that expertise. So, that whole thing, again, takes people from an environment that was very structured, that was very regimented, that was very rigid, and they understood exactly how to succeed into this very open-ended, broad, choose your own adventure, but become the expert by the end of it environment that is very nerve-wracking. And not a lot of people talk about that. So, there’s a lot of hidden curriculum. A lot of what is doctoral training. It depends on who your advisor is. It depends on who your department is. It depends what university you’re at. It depends what country you’re in. It depends what decade you’re currently a doctoral student in. So much goes into that in ways that undergrad is just less ambiguous. In that way, we’re set up, again, to be very vulnerable to these feelings self-doubt, self-criticism, a fear that we don’t know what we’re doing but everybody else does. So, that’s one area. Another area is a really important aspect of graduate training is critical feedback. And for most of us, we were never taught how to receive and then mobilize critical feedback. Because in undergrad, again, oftentimes the critical feedback we get is just a bad grade. So, if you are receiving critical feedback, it’s because you didn’t do something right. You messed up. You are wrong. Whereas in doctoral training, even if we’re being told we didn’t do something the way it was supposed to, it’s always in the service of, and here’s how we do it better or here’s how we do it differently. Part of our whole profession is around criticism, right? So, we get peer reviewed, which is where other scholars in our field who have expertise in our area will go through and find holes in our theory, will critique our methods and challenge how we structured our study design. That’s not to say we did it incorrectly, but it’s part of the process of developing knowledge, and developing scholarship is going through that back and forth. It is not punitive the way maybe it felt or was more designed in lower levels of academia. And so, if we can’t see that as part of the learning process, if we can’t see it as valuable to our development, then we just hear it as, “I keep messing up. Every time I send something to my advisor, they send it back with 20-line item edits that I need to fix. So, therefore, I’m not doing it correctly.” But on the flip side, if you never received that critical feedback, if everything you did was “perfect” from the start, which it’s not even going to be perfect at the end, then why are we here? Why are we spending our time and our energy trying to grow as scholars if we already knew everything, if all of our methods were perfect, if we designed every study exactly right. That’s just not how learning goes. It’s an iterative process. We’re supposed to continuously go back and forth. So, that lack of understanding that, one, critical feedback is important in grad school, and two, it is going to be something that you are going to receive through the remainder of your career if you choose to stay in academia or research. It is easy to see why people have those experiences and then become afraid of future evaluations if they hear that feedback as criticism as opposed to critique. And then we don’t talk. So, very few of us talk about all the manuscripts we submitted that got rejected. I am currently over a year into a manuscript that has been desk rejected once. I’m about to submit it to another journal- Sam Hobson: Congrats. Danielle Rosenscruggs: … and hopefully it only gets critiqued by peer reviews, right? But it’s rare that people are just talking about all the things that they’re “failing on.” They’re just talking about what’s successful. We see in our newsletters how many papers you got published this year, not how many papers you submitted or how many papers got rejected. We get to see how many papers you got accepted. And how many awards you received as opposed to the number of grants you applied for and didn’t receive. So, there’s just this lack of transparency as well that adds an additional layer of complexity to this whole experience. Sam Hobson: My mind is spinning. Oh, my goodness. First of all, I want us to have a section, celebrating our failures from now on. Whenever we talk about the things that we receive from Rackham, the things that we receive from our departments, why can’t we celebrate like, “I applied to six things this year. I didn’t get any of them, but the work that I put in to apply to those six things took a lot. And it also took a lot of courage too.” And maybe we can all learn from each other and also see … it helps us with the development and understanding the non-linearity that is our path in graduate school. Yeah. I want a failures column. I want it. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. And there are … I forget the scholar who started it, but there was a researcher or a professor who published their failure CV. And in corporate environments there’s this embracing of fail fast, fail forward, that type of thing. So, the concepts are there, but I find that the only people who are willing to step into the light and say, “Here are my failures,” are the ones who are already incredibly successful. Sam Hobson: Right. Danielle Rosenscruggs: And so, it creates this misleading narrative of like we can appreciate our failures in hindsight once we have achieved greatness. Sam Hobson: Yeah. Danielle Rosenscruggs: And instead, like you said, it would be great, especially starting as a first year, second year, a third year grad student to constantly be seeing where people were attempting things. Not even failing, because as we all know, and this is again where sometimes we can only appreciate it in hindsight, and I am trying to figure out how to get people to appreciate before hindsight. Applying for a grant and not getting it is not failure. Because for most of us, applying for that grant forced us to think through the project more deeply than we had to, to think through our justification and how we can defend the importance of the project. It probably had us talking to other people about our project to get feedback on the grant application in ways that maybe we wouldn’t talk to people about the project that we were planning. And in each round, we get better. And the same thing is true with the manuscript. So, this manuscript that I got desk rejected, which is always sad, but the editor gave great notes. And I agreed after reading the notes that, yes, this paper could be stronger. And so, we made it stronger. And now, we’re submitting it again and we will get feedback, hopefully again from peer reviewers to say, “Revise and resubmit.” But they will also point out things that we will either say, “Nope. I’m going to defend this and here’s how,” which will make me a better scholar. Or, “Yup. That was something that I just overlooked because I’m so deep into this project that I didn’t see that gap or I didn’t see the assumption that I was making.” So, I agree with you. I wish there was a way that we could show our progress more transparently without increasing the ways that we become competitive with each other, because social comparison is insanely toxic in grad school. I suffer from it, just like most people. But also, where we don’t just see it as I have now succeeded, so now I am willing to show you all the ways that I failed. It’s just like … Sam Hobson: Right. Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. It’s hiding the way everything gets made. And what we’re here to learn is how things get made, how to learn. Sam Hobson: Right. Yes. And in that vein, when you’re talking about the necessary component of critical feedback for our time in graduate school, sure, I realized that, but I never realized how much knowledge production is an extremely individual yet collaborative process. You’re not going to produce knowledge without collaborating with the minds of others. And we do that typically through receiving critical feedback. And I never thought of it that way. And because we don’t necessarily talk about it in those terms, then it contributes to, again, the ambiguity of how is knowledge produced. It’s like, actually, it’s produced with others even if you don’t work with others on a project. And so, I can just see how this all piles up into the experience or the feelings of impostorism when it’s like, all of these things that are requirements of graduate school, and yet nobody’s talking about that. And so, as a result, we think that these requirements are our fault, our failings in some way. “I received critical feedback. It’s my fault.” Not like, “No, dude, this is literally what needs to happen in order for you to get to the next step.” Danielle Rosenscruggs: Yeah. Sam Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. Danielle Rosenscruggs: And I always bring things back to physical analogies because for some reason, physical training, people are way more comfortable getting guidance and feedback and corrections on than mental training. I don’t really know why. I’m sure someone is studying that somewhere. But if you went to a personal trainer and were like, “Hey, I want to get stronger,” you would start doing the exercises they told you to do. One, they would be really hard at the start, and you wouldn’t question that. You wouldn’t be like, “Oh, because this exercise is hard, I can’t do it.” You would say, “Because this exercise is hard, it is clear that I need to do it because this muscle needs to get stronger.” Sam Hobson: Right. Danielle Rosenscruggs: So, you would lean into that in ways that we don’t lean into it when it is mental training. And also, if you were doing a bench press, for example, and the trainer came over and were like, “Okay. So, you’re holding your hands this way. You want to put them a little bit wider. You want to put your feet down. You want to do your core.” You would welcome that. And that is critical feedback. They’re critiquing your form so that you get better, because they have knowledge that you don’t currently have. And you would do it, and maybe at first it would feel weird, but then it would get better. And for some reason, again, when we talk about our training, when we talk about our scholarship development, we don’t think of it in the same way. We don’t think at the beginning it’s really hard because I don’t know what I’m doing. We are novices. That is sometimes the conflation between feeling like a novice, a beginner, and feeling like an impostor, a fraud, which is of course, I’m just starting. And newsflash, our whole PhD program is us just starting. So, I’m not just talking about the first year or two in your doctoral program. So, your whole time here, we are baby scholars, we are just starting. So, we don’t see those things as, “Yes, I’m struggling, I’m confused, because this is new and I have never done this before, or I haven’t done it a lot.” And then we don’t internalize the feedback we get as welcoming as we do from the personal trainer, even though it’s the same thing. Sam Hobson: What a lovely analogy. That is so helpful. I feel like it makes it so much more clear and obvious. And yeah, I love that. You’re right. We got to get that out there. The Danielle Rosenscruggs’ way. Danielle Rosenscruggs: No. Not my way. Never name after a person. No. But yeah. And again, these aren’t unique to me thoughts. It’s not something that’s pervasive right now in grad school. And I wish, yeah, like you said, we do everything together. So, it’ll take joint efforts. And that’s where I feel the role of senior grad students comes into play. A lot of the way we think about our grad training and the way we navigate our grad training is how those who came before us talked about their training and gave us advice. And so, as we are becoming more senior grad students, I think that it’s important to try to frame things in that way. Not to lie to people or not to paint things rosy colored, but not just focus on, “Here’s how grad school’s going to suck. Here’s how the faculty aren’t going to help you. Here’s how the department is going to get in your way.” I saw that a lot when I was a even babier grad student. And narratives become reality. We all know that, especially anyone listening who’s a social scientist, the stories we tell ourselves become true. So, I think that it’s important that we focus on how we are thinking about it, how we are talking about it, and how we are choosing to intentionally create these spaces. Because right now, I think oftentimes we are doing it a little bit on autopilot. And autopilot for a lot of people tends to skew negative, unfortunately. That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just how our brains are wired sometimes. So, I think some intentionality towards reframing towards opportunity and how we can be empowered in these environments and these programs could go a long way for how we generationally impact what these programs look like moving forward. Sam Hobson: I love that. Yeah. Okay. Danielle, we have learned a lot about the impostor phenomenon. If a grad student here were interested in learning more about it and how to deal with those inevitable feelings that arise, where could they go? What should they do? Danielle Rosenscruggs: So that’s a great question. There’s a lot of different paths to take. None of them are the pill, right? So, none of them is the like, “Do this and then boom, impostor feelings go away forever, and we are magically cured.” Again, as we’ve talked about, a lot of these thoughts and experiences come from years of socialization, years of patterns of negative self-talk. So, it took us a long time to get here. So, I just want to set the expectation for folks that it will take time and energy to start heading down a different path. So, don’t want to set up the false expectation that it will be something that happens overnight, because again, we can all be very self-critical. So, if you try some of the things I’m going to mention and they don’t immediately make everything better. I don’t want it to open the door to anyone thinking, “Oh, I’ve even failed at this. I’m not good at trying to overcome my impostor thinking.” So, that’s a caveat. So, some of the tangible things that you can do are on campus. So, Rackham does have the Impostorism Workshop. It’s a two-hour experience. It goes a little bit more into the theory and some of the data, the research, but then it also covers applied strategies for managing impostor feelings. It’s only offered, I think, a couple times a year. I am less involved now that I’m dissertating, but I was one of the facilitators, and sometimes still am. We have a companion workbook that we developed for that Impostorism Workshop. And that came out of students attending the two-hour workshop and saying, “Okay. But I need more support. Where do I go from here?” And so, this workbook, it’s about, I think, 40 pages. We have it in digital form. It covers the theory and a little bit of what we talked about here, but then actually provides exercises and guided strategies that are empirically based. So, sometimes they’re evidence-based strategies specifically for impostor experiences. Sometimes they’re related to lots of the ways that impostorism can manifest. So, again, negative self-talk, perfectionism, procrastination, cognitive distortions, lots of those things. But everything’s evidence-based and research-grounded. So, we have that in PDF form, and they are actually interactive. So, you can fill out the exercises. We have links to different recordings. So, I think that could be a really great resource for folks. And even if you haven’t attended the workshop, it was written in such a way by me and a colleague of mine at Rackham, Laura Schram, who’s now in the Dean’s Office. It was written in such a way that you could use it even if you never attended the workshop. So, I think that it’s a really great resource and something that’s freely available to all Rackham students. Another thing to do is check out CAPS counselors. So, I know that some folks have resistance to mental health counselors, but we have really great CAPS counselors embedded at Rackham. So, that means that they are CAPS counselors that are dedicated. The only people that they interact with are Rackham students. So, they are really tuned into the experience of what it is to be in grad school. Some departments also have embedded counselors as well. So, it would be useful if that’s something that folks want to check out to reach out, to their department. And those services are free to students. And then if a traditional psychologist isn’t your jam, Wolverine Wellness also offers coaching. And that’s a little bit different than traditional counseling because coaching is more action, behavior, outcome-focused. But they are very familiar with impostor experiences. I’ve given talks to their staff. I worked as a coach as well for a while. And that can be a really good opportunity for support for folks that just need check-ins to say, “I’m heading into this project, maybe my dissertation, maybe my thesis. I’m struggling with these feelings of impostorism. I’m struggling with these feelings of self-doubt and I need support through this process.” So, that can be really useful. And then finally, it’s just talking about it. So, it seems really easy. It seems overly simple, but there is actually scholarship. There’s research that shows that talking about impostor experiences, either with advisors, mentors, or just other peers in your program, it has been shown in research to significantly reduce feelings of impostorism. And that’s because again, these cognitive distortions, this negative self-talk, this self-doubt thrives in isolation. It really does well when there’s no other voices countering those things. It does well when no one is there to check us on these thoughts to be like, “Whoa, whoa. Hold on. This doesn’t make sense.” And it’s also really validating to hear that other people are having the same experiences, especially if they are people that you view as successful and talented and skilled. So, that begins to help us understand, “Oh, this is not actually grounded in reality. This isn’t grounded in logic. This is a distortion.” So, talking through things, even if you’re not interested in going the more formal route, is incredibly important. The one thing that I would discourage people from doing, although if this is helpful, everyone can pick their own paths, but I would be very weary of the things you see online that are just like the 10 ways to cure your impostor thinking or your impostor syndrome. Anything that says cure or eliminate or anything that’s extreme, I would take with a grain of salt because often they are overly simplified listicles that are just meant to encourage clicks, right? So, everyone wants to know how to cure their impostor thinking, so they’re going to click on it. And it can create this problematic expectation of, again, how long this will take, how much energy it will take. And I hate for people to feel set up for thinking that, again, they did something wrong. So, anyone offering a magic bullet cure for this or anything else is probably selling snake oil, right? So, it’s just a matter of learning to reframe how we think, reframe how we are kind to ourselves, and just eliminating this hidden curriculum, behind the scenes stuff that is grad school. It’s a long process and it takes a lot of effort. So just be wary of those offering quick fix cures. I’m also here as a resource. I mean, again, I led the pilot for Rackham and had a great experience supporting grad students. I worked with Wolverine Wellness before. So, I am always open to anyone that wants to reach out to me personally, whether it’s to find out more about the impostor phenomenon from an academic standpoint. So, you want recommendations on where to start in a literature or you want coaching sessions, or you just want to have a quick chat about your experiences just to see if there’s a path that I recommend, that, people can always do. So, I’m open to that, absolutely. I love supporting other students through this process. Sam Hobson: Is there anything else you’d like to add before we go? Danielle Rosenscruggs: So, I really just want to emphasize that just because you feel like an impostor doesn’t mean you are an impostor. I think oftentimes we talk about, especially in the literature, impostors and non-impostors, and the reality is no one is the impostor, because the people who are actually frauds know it and thrive on it and are actively conning people, right? So, I really just want to emphasize that you may feel like a fake, you may feel like a fraud, you may feel like you don’t belong here, but you absolutely do. And everything you’ve done up until this point got you here. And I just want to emphasize that, yeah, if you’re here, if you’re already in grad school, if you’re doing these things, that’s evidence that you aren’t a fraud. So, I hope you can repeat that or find words of kindness to yourself, but there’s no such thing as an impostor in grad school. There’s just not. Sam Hobson: All right. Here are three takeaways from this episode for your well-being journey. One, impostor feelings are a normative response to the experience of higher education. But focusing our energy on not being caught as an impostor keeps us from achieving our fullest potential in grad school. Two, knowledge production is a communal process. So, while critical feedback can feel scary and it can feel like proof that we don’t belong, it’s a very necessary component of scholarship. So, learning to receive it as a gift rather than as a punishment can go a long way towards our well-being in graduate school and beyond. And three, as Danielle said, we are not seeing things clearly and accurately when we convince ourselves that we’re frauds. There are so many gates that you had to get through to get into this room. You earned this. Check out our website for all the resources Danielle mentioned and more at rackham.umich.edu/gradwell. You can reach out to Danielle with any questions that you have at [email protected]. You can contact us about the podcast at [email protected]. And make sure to join us next time for the second half of this segment on the Impostor Phenomenon, when I speak with Dianna Alvarado, PhD candidate and developmental psychology about the protective strategies that we can use to navigate impostor feelings. I will see you then. Hey, hardworking grad student, thank you for turning into GradWell. I hope you can take something away from this episode with you. If you like what you heard, be sure to write a review, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For more information, check us out on social @UMichGradSchool.
