Ever felt like you don’t belong? Like you don’t deserve to be where you are, that you’re just faking competence you don’t really have?

If not, it may surprise you to learn that this is a very common feeling among successful young academics. It’s called impostor syndrome, and it happens to some very talented people.

It’s surprisingly easy to rationalize success as luck, to assume praise comes from people who don’t know the full story. In science, we’re surrounded by people who seem to come up with brilliant insights on a regular basis. We see others’ successes far more often than we see their failures, and often we forget that science is at its heart a process of throwing ideas against a wall until something sticks. Hyper-aware of our own failures, when we present ourselves as successful we can feel like we’re putting on a paper-thin disguise, constantly at risk that someone will see through it.

As paper-thin disguises go, I prefer the classics.

In my experience, theoretical physics is especially heavy on impostor syndrome, for a number of reasons.

First, there’s the fact that beginning grad students really don’t know all they need to. Theoretical physics requires a lot of specialized knowledge, and most grad students just have the bare bones basics of a physics undergrad degree. On the strength of those basics, you’re somehow supposed to convince a potential advisor, an established, successful scientist, that you’re worth paying attention to.

Throw in the fact that many people have a little more than the basics, whether from undergrad research projects or grad-level courses taken early, and you have a group where everyone is trying to seem more advanced than they are. There’s a very real element of fake it till you make it, of going to talks and picking up just enough of the lingo to bluff your way through a conversation.

And the thing is, even after you make it, you’ll probably still feel like you’re faking it.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s an enormous amount of jury-rigging that goes into physics research. There are a huge number of side-disciplines that show up at one point or another, from numerical methods to programming to graphic design. We can’t hire a professional to handle these things, we have to learn them ourselves. As such, we become minor dabblers in a whole mess of different fields. Work on something enough and others will start looking to you for help. It won’t feel like you’re an expert, though, because you know in the back of your mind that the real experts know so much more.

In the end, the best approach I’ve found is simply to keep saying yes. Keep using what you know, going to talks and trying new things. The more you “pretend” to know what you’re doing, the more experience you’ll get, until you really do know what you’re doing. There’s always going to be more to learn, but chances are if you’re feeling impostor syndrome you’ve already learned a lot. Take others’ opinions of you at face value, and see just how far you can go.