Impostor syndrome: is this normal, or is my gut telling me something real?
I’m in my last year of my master’s and planning to start a PhD next year. I found a supervisor I genuinely love. I did an internship with him last year and it went really well. I contributed more than any intern had before, even co-authoring a paper. We stayed in touch, collaborated on a new project, and just submitted it for funding together. He’s kind, believes in me, and is willing to support my PhD.
Here’s the complicated part: my marks are really not good. I had some family situations that caused me to take longer than usual for both my bachelor’s and now my master’s. And before that internship, I had mentally checked out and stopped putting in effort. It was only after discovering the field I actually want to work in that I became proactive and intentional again.
He always said he doesn’t care about marks, so I never showed him my transcripts. I was riddled with guilt about it and felt like he was blindly signing onto something without the full picture. My older sister kept telling me not to bring it up because it would only make things look worse, and I followed her advice. But the guilt and anxiety were so heavy that I think they genuinely affected my first round of exams this year.
Then, right when we were about to submit the funding request together, he finally saw my transcripts for the first time. And he still moved forward. He has enough funding to support me for a year. But after that, I will need to secure external funding, and for that I need strong marks now. So the stakes feel very real.
And yet I have more exams coming up, and I am so anxious that I am scared it is going to affect those too, just like the last round.
I genuinely love research. I love everything about it and I can really see myself building a career in it. But I keep going back and forth: is this impostor syndrome that I need to push through, or is the anxiety actually trying to tell me something true? Should I slow down, take a step back, or just keep going?
Has anyone been in a similar situation? How do you deal with anxiety that feels like it might be both irrational and also a little bit real at the same time?