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Ah, the imposter syndrome!? The beauty of the imposter syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania, and a complete feeling of: “I’m a fraud! Oh god, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!” So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud. Seriously, I’ve just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it. Tina Fey (The Independent, March 2010)
Our experience
After completing Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degrees in the spring of 2017, the authors of this article, Meredith and Jessica, were fortunately able to find work in academic libraries a few months later. Though perhaps atypical, the use of the authors’ first names in this article is intentional, as it establishes a personal and accessible tone that is advantageous when engaging with the subject matter. Jessica began work as a science librarian and Meredith as a temporary research and instruction librarian. They had worked together closely during the master’s program and continued to stay connected as they navigated their first “capital L” Librarian jobs. As Meredith and Jessica were working on turning their capstone research into a presentation for a conference, they began thinking about other conference paper topics. Jessica was already in a tenure track position and needed to produce scholarly and creative output to keep that position. Meredith, who was only assured two and a half quarters of work for her temporary position, felt that engaging in the profession through conferences would put her in a better position at the end of her contract. “But what could we possibly tell experienced librarians about?” they lamented. “We’re so new and know nothing!” This, of course, is factually untrue. The authors are both reasonably intelligent individuals who managed to complete their graduate studies with decent grades and find employment. Why, then, did they feel so unprepared and underqualified? Meredith and Jessica decided they could not be the only ones feeling this way and to dig into the situations surrounding imposter syndrome (more accurately called imposter phenomenon). The authors’ first step was to start documenting their own feelings of being unqualified in an attempt to identify the...