Be the Weed

I was sharply reminded of a story that a med school student once told me about his first week of medical school. He said one of the professors stood up in lecture and asked the class to close their eyes and quietly raise their hand if even once that week they had looked around the class and felt out of place. If even once they had felt inadequate or insecure about their education and like they were way behind everyone else. In the audience you could hear the whispers of hands sliding to the sky. “How many of you”, he continued, “feel like a weed among roses? Keep your hands up and open your eyes.” Every student and every professor in the room held one hand towards the sky. “Remember this.” he said, and sat back down in the panel of accomplished PhD’s and medical doctors who were slow to lower their hands providing emphasis to his point.

In 1978 clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes conducted a study about accomplishment insecurities that gave the name “Imposter Effect” to this rather uncomfortable feeling. They described this to be particularly rampant among young graduate students. When interviewed and asked directly I would wager that most of the people who come to graduate school in any discipline thinks at some level that he or she is woefully underprepared, not smart enough, and somehow fundamentally incompetent despite a whole transcript of evidence to the contrary.

This imposter effect/syndrome is not only frustrating for the students but also for the instructors. In my class it was a constant complaint from our lecturers that we refused to ask or answer questions in class. I know from my experience and conversations from others that we did not dare to raise our hands because we were SURE- SURE- that our questions were so basic and silly that some magical mechanical arm would pluck us straight from our uncomfortable chairs and fling us right back to kindergarten. There are of course, the few students in every class who actually do understand the lecture and ask a question with such smug smart authority as to silence me forever. These are the roses. There only needs to be one to transform your whole class into seeming like a field of intelligent groomed flowers and leave you feeling insignificant and out of place. Any minute now they would see me there stupefied and pluck me out like the weed I was sure I was.

I remember one day in particular during a genetics lecture, I was struck by the idea that I had absolutely no idea what cell type or region in the body we were discussing. The miraculous gene du jour was quickly flashing by on the class room screen and all I could think of was what THE-EVER-LOVING F&% is this woman talking about??! Turns out she was talking about yeast, so I was glad I didn’t ask any questions.

The semester raged on and test after painful test my answers to the exam questions got longer and more specific. Very occasionally the answers were even a little bit right. Sobbing into an early exam, I was vastly comforted by a classmate whom I consider to be among the smartest in our group. She showed me where she had written as an answer on her exam, “1 +1= Jello.” She said, “See no one knows what the eff is going on, I need a beer.”

So in the end my point is this: if you make it this far you are going to have big growing pains in one area or another. There are hurdles and blocks that you will be expected to learn and grow around. You will miss the lab you came from and hate, with the fury of a thousand suns, the smug smart kid with good questions. You will waste considerable amount of energy hoping this fury will, just once this once, channel accordingly and the smug smart kid will burst into flames. I am here to tell you, smug smart kid feels just like you. I know this because just a few years ago, after answering a question in class, smug smart kid said to me with an all too familiar look in his narrowed eyes, “I don’t know how you know all of this stuff.”

My advice? Be the weed. Roses don’t just grow wherever they are planted. They are delicate; they need special handling and care. Only weeds succeed in the cracks along the sidewalks. Weeds, given time, cover hurdles and break down blocks. Working harder with less than everyone else, weeds find a way to make it happen no matter what. Trust they chose you for a reason. Go be a weed and go be it well.