Do you ever worry that you're not serious enough for academia? That you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with hiding your many frivolous and unimpressive traits as you try to convince everyone that you deserve your place at the table? That you're a big old fake because you need to curate yourself so much in order to seem like you belong? If so, you're not alone - and it's not because you're flawed. It's because you're yet to uncover academia's dirty little secret: that it's just a job. If you can get your head around that, life will be much less stressful.

References

Goffman, Erving. 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre).

Guignon, Charles. 2004: On Being Authentic (London: Routledge). (Bernard Williams quotation on page viii.)

Hawley, Katherine. 2019: 'What is impostor syndrome?', Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93/1: 203–226.

Kelsky, Karen. 2021: 'Academia is a cult', TEDx Talks.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1770: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lester Crocker (ed.) (New York: Pocket Books, 1957).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943: Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992).