Dear Academia, we need to talk about imposter syndrome and undergraduate mental health.

I don't talk about it on twitter much -- I think I've tweeted about it twice -- but towards the end of my second year, and most of the way through... (1/N)

#AcademicTwitter @AcademicChatter

my third, I suffered from an insane bout of imposter syndrome, exacerbated by my nearly failing grades in third stage Quantum Mechanics, and a failing grade in an Artificial Intelligence course. After nearly relapsing in first year of postgrad... (2/N)

and failing grad school QM, I finally kicked its ass by getting an A+ and first in course in QFT. But this isn't always the case.

Although lecturers have been through the tertiary system, sometimes I wonder if they remember what its like.... (3/N)

I won't mention names (but if you've been one of my lecturers, and you follow me on twitter -- it wasn't you or anyone in your dept!), but one of my undergrad lecturers, in a course that barely required Calc I, started invoking all sorts of Calc II/III results, and... (4/N)

he started responding to all student questions -- *ALL* of them -- with "Well this is pretty trivial...". Multiple students complained about him, to the extent that many dropped the course we found out he was teaching in second semester that year. He... (5/N)

was one of the worst teachers I've ever had, and caused no end of mental health problems within the cohort. In writing this thread I went back in my emails and found a trove of comments made by him with regards to other students. As far as I am aware... (6/N)

he was disciplined then but still continues to teach.

Imposter Syndrome is a BITCH. And in academia it can really stunt a student's progress, harm their self-esteem, and worse. It's all too common in academia -- at least in my limited experience -- to focus on... (7/N)

the outcomes and not the process. A student is benchmarked by what they can recite in 2-3 hours, which often leads to undue stress for students who know they can be better, and yet are achieving lower than they expect / are used to / want to. I'm definitely not saying... (8/N)

that everybody should pass every course without trying. But there's some undue expectation that students drag themselves to the ends of the earth to learn the content. We joke about "am I finishing my degree or is my degree finishing me ahahahah" but sometimes... (9/N)

this rings too true. We should start thinking about reworking our education system to focus more on the human, and not a letter on a transcript hidden behind a degree. (10/10)