"We knew we were good."

When I was a graduate student at UNC-CH, the Biology department recruited a new assistant professor. She had gotten her PhD at Yale, then did a postdoc at the Medical Research Council labs in the UK and a second postdoc at the Harvard Biolabs. Some time after she had settled in, several of us were hanging out on a Friday afternoon, and one of the students asked her how she compared the students at UNC with the ones she knew at Yale. Her answer was “at Yale, we knew we were good.”

She wasn’t saying Yale students are better. She was saying that being at Yale was a kind of solvent that dissolved the miasma of insecurity that striving people feel, the anxiety that leads to imposter syndrome.

That story has always stayed with me because of what it says about the power of society to hijack our self-image. What I learned is to pay attention to the values and myths of society, but not to be enslaved by them. And similarly, to avoid judging others by their credentials.