"I Am Not Enough": Impostor Phenomenon Experiences of University Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent work has confirmed that computing students experience the Imposter Phenomenon (IP) at higher rates than reported in other disciplines. However, no work has examined what aspects of the university computing experience might lead to a higher rate of IP experiences. We aim to illustrate the IP experiences students have, identify common sources of these experiences, and document the effects of these experiences and how students respond to them. We asked undergraduate students to share recent experiences that illustrate their experiences with the IP. We conducted an inductive thematic analysis on these open-ended responses, resulting in a set of inter-connected themes. A significant fraction of students related stories about making comparisons with peers or observing peer behaviour that made them question their abilities. Students also spoke about holding unrealistic expectations learned from their peers or imposed by the environment. These experiences may be particularly acute for minority-affiliated students who may come to feel they do not belong. Ultimately, these IP experiences can lead to a loss of motivation or a cycle of failure that leads students to leave computing. The central role social comparisons play in IP experiences suggests that it is particularly important to foster communities where opportunities for comparison are reduced and where realistic expectations are explicitly set.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".