It's Not Just in Your Head: Institutional Contexts That Position Black Doctoral Engineering Students as Impostors

• In Event: 519 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 01. Institutions at the Intersections

Abstract

The experiences of Black engineering doctoral students are underexplored in higher education research. While scholars and policymakers have recognized the underrepresentation of women and Black students in STEM and strengthened their gaze on the STEM pipeline, most of the attention has been focused on early sections of the pipeline. In this study, we focus on its later sections by presenting the narratives of thirty-one high-achieving African-American doctoral students at various U.S. engineering institutions. To help frame this study we expand the theory of impostor syndrome by analyzing participant experiences through the lens of goal-striving stress. Study participants discussed persistent feelings of insecurity, unworthiness, and academic incompetence in their doctoral programs. In other words, they felt like impostors, a state known as impostor syndrome. Some participants described their feelings of impostorism as self-imposed or derived from their own psyches, but others attested that these emotions resulted from racialized and gendered stereotypes and biases that permeated their departments. Our participants often contextualized their experiences by juxtaposing them with the experiences of students who they perceived as having more affirming experiences, typically White, Asian, and male students. Our analysis of participants’ experiences demonstrates that students are placed in situations and presented with ideologies and behaviors that make them feel like impostors. Thus, we challenge interventions that propose that students are responsible for their own feelings of impostorism while ignoring deliberate institutional structures and practices that allow impostorism to thrive.

Authors

• Ebony McGee, Vanderbilt University

• Stacey Houston, Vanderbilt University