What am I doing in a place like this?: Understanding Imposter Phenomenon amongst postgraduate students from minoritised racial backgrounds

Abstract

Imposter Phenomenon (IP) involves experiencing persistent feelings of perceived insufficiency and fraudulence, despite contrary evidence of objective success or accomplishment. The aim of this research was to explore factors which may trigger or maintain feelings of imposterism in postgraduate students from minoritised racial backgrounds, and investigate students’ perspectives of what Higher Education (HE) institutions could do to help prevent or reduce IP. All postgraduate, students from a large UK university who self-identified as being from a minoritised racial background and felt they had experience of IP were invited to take part in an online survey. Demographic information was collected, and participants were asked open-ended qualitative questions about their feelings and experiences of IP. In total 71 students completed the survey. Four main themes were developed using thematic analysis: Hidden away; Problematic awareness; Hell is other people; Our complicated lives. We report these themes in turn, exploring the nuanced and contextual qualities that frame our participants’ experiences of IP. Imposterism is seen to present a range of challenges for students who identify as members of minoritised racial groups, and our findings emphasise the relatedness between representation, belonging, and feelings of imposterism. We suggest that imposterism should be investigated as a multi-layered phenomenon that is potentially more likely to impact students from minoritised backgrounds who lack representation in UK HE settings. We conclude by offering a series of recommendations for HE institutions, which could start to address some of these issues.