Am I the imposter? A look at imposter syndrome in medical students

This week we are chuffed to have our first study, conducted by the infinitely lovely Enya Costin, 1st year rep and mental health HCA extraordinaire.

Imposter syndrome: a feeling of inadequacy that persists despite evident success.

As a current first year who has not experienced the normality of in person lectures, I have not met most of my year group. After the first knowledge test in first term, I was speaking to a few people who had all presumed I achieved a distinction grade. I had not and had in fact got a mid-range pass grade that I was happy with.

Most of the people I had spoken to were unhappy with their pass grade, a few of them only being 1 or 2 marks away from the distinction grade boundary. As medical students the majority of us have always been high achievers who have rarely experienced failure, or we class failure as anything below the top grade. Putting all high achievers together inevitably means that some people will not always be top of the class like in previous education, but that is ok. It is a new experience for many and can contribute to feeling like you are not good enough to be here, which can cause imposter syndrome.

After talking to a few people, who had all thought I had done better than them (when I had not, and I also hadn’t discussed my grades with anyone at this point), it made me start thinking about the effect of our year only having online learning. Medicine is an inherently competitive career, with many of us comparing ourselves to our peers, consciously or subconsciously, to judge how we are doing. Our year has never had a whole year lecture together, looking around and seeing other confused faces. We have never left an exam and seen everyone else complaining or looking relieved. Apart from our friends and social media, we have no idea how each other are finding first year so far. I wondered if this lack of comparison has contributed to more of our year feeling like they are further behind than they are or experiencing increased imposter syndrome. For example, pre recorded lectures are difficult for many people. In first time I had fallen behind with our scheduled lectures but spoke openly about this with other people in the year. A few people then said they were relieved that they were not the only ones behind. If you are not around other people to see how they are doing, it can sometimes feel like you are the only one struggling.

It was after this that I decided for my next PsychSoc blog post I would try and survey our year to see if anyone was feeling similarly. Looking over the results of our year groups responses, I hope many of you feel better, and realise that a lot of people are feeling this way.

The questions of the survey and their results;

I first asked whether people had heard of imposter syndrome. This was to determine how prevalent awareness of this phenomenon was. Most people had heard of imposter syndrome before, showing that it is something that many medical students are aware of.

I then asked if people had experienced this and gave some examples in case people were unaware of what imposter syndrome was. The majority of responders (82.9%) had experienced feelings related to imposter syndrome since starting medical school in September.

My next question was whether anyone had experienced this before starting medical school. 61% of responders replied positively to this. This is less than the amount currently experiencing imposter syndrome, suggesting that many are feeling it for the first time at medical school.

To understand how much online learning would effect the ability to compare yourself to others, I first needed to see how many people based their progress off of comparisons to peers. 65.9% replied that they do base how they are doing on comparison to peers, and a further 7.3% said they do this “sometimes”. This result suggests that the inability to compare yourself to your peers would affect most responders in some sort of way, either positively or negatively.

After finding out the prevalence of comparison to peers, I then asked whether they felt behind their peers. Most responders (62.9%) replied with yes, they do feel behind the rest of their year group.

I found the previous results quite interesting and wanted to see if people agreed with my initial thought that it may be the lack of comparison due to online learning that is making them feel behind the rest of the year. Interestingly, 12.2% of people who said they do feel imposter syndrome said this would not be improved with in person teaching. Some people in the extra comments box even said that it would be worse for them as they could see how people were doing, rather than just not knowing. A special shout out to whoever did the custom purple answer of “what if I found that I’m worse omg”, as many people shared this thought in the custom comments box later in the survey.

Only 51.2% of responders answered a definitive “yes” to whether their imposter syndrome has grown worse since moving completely online during the lockdown. This shows that to the people who responded, over half believed the lockdown has made their imposter syndrome increase.

This chart shows how people rate their imposter syndrome on a scale of 1-10. The majority of people rated their imposter syndrome at an 8/10. 9.8% people rated their imposter syndrome a 10/10. 65.% of all responders to this survey rated their imposter syndrome at 5 or above. This suggests the majority of people are experiencing a high level of imposter syndrome during medical school.

This was one of the most interesting questions in my opinion. On social media, I had seen many medical students expressing the feeling that they should always be doing more and feel guilty for not studying when they take breaks. 87.8% of responders felt this way.

A part of imposter syndrome is believing you have tricked people into giving you your current position. This question determines how often people question whether they should be in medical school or not. With 17.1% saying daily, and 31.7% saying weekly, this part of imposter syndrome is present within the responses. Only around a quarter of the responders said they have never questioned whether they should be at medical school. I hope these results in particular can reassure people that many people also question themselves regularly, and that you are not the only one.

This question focussed on whether online learning has made people feel more behind on their work than normal times. Most people do feel more behind, but interestingly many also pointed out that the lockdown has given them more time to focus and complete work.

Currently, one of the only methods of finding out how other people have done on their exams is either individual conversations or through social media. I personally always avoid social media and mute group chats after exams, and do not discuss my results. I wanted to see if others did similarly. After our first KT, the only people I saw posting about their results were people who got distinctions. This is great for them and they deserve to feel proud, but I also wondered whether only seeing people discuss results when they went exceptionally well would increase imposter syndrome in other students. Most people do not post their results, with some only sharing with friends. A small percentage agreed that it would depend on whether they did “well” or not.

My last direct question was to find out whether other people avoid social media after exams. I personally hate hearing other people discuss questions, so avoid any discussions around them including group chats. Over half of responders do not do this, with around a quarter more saying that their action is based on how they feel they performed.

Lastly, I asked people if they had any extra comments that they wanted to add. I wanted to share a few that I thought were particularly important.

“I think I have actually been more focused on my course as I’ve had less distractions at home than at uni.”

“Being given my a level results makes it worse because people have said you didn’t really deserve them or refer to others as people who ACTUALLY did their exams which makes it so much worse.”

“I feel like my imposter syndrome Will get worse when in person teaching starts again because I will actually see what people are doing not just think about it”

“It’s like u r always working if not you felt like u should be”

“It has limited me to know a small amount of people and the people I know have been doing very well and it makes me glad when I’m in MS breakout rooms and others discuss they have also found the term hard and need to catch up like me.”

I also tried to get a wider response from years 2 and 3 but had a limited number of responses which meant I could not draw conclusions. From some of the comments however, I have seen imposter syndrome can get worse as people enter clinical years, and some second years are worried about their preparedness for their clinical years. Both have caused some increased feelings of imposter syndrome.

Although this was not an entire year response, I know from talking to other people that it can be reassuring to find out that people feel similarly to you. I hope this blog post summarising some of the responses to this survey can help show people that we are all in the same situation currently, that many people will not admit to being behind especially if you have not had a chance to meet them yet, and that you are not alone in how you are feeling.