I thought it was the best speech I had ever heard. I was leaning forward in my chair, noddingvigorously Artas Robotic Hair Transplant. Carrie Weber, my brilliant and totally-not-a-fraud roommate, was doing the same. At last,someone was articulating exactly how I felt.on in class, I was sure that I wasabout to embarrass myself. Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time Ididn’t embarrass myself—or even excelled—I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One daysoon, the jig would be up.

At the joint reception that followed the ceremony—an after-party for nerds, so I fit right in—I toldone of my male classmates about Dr. McIntosh’s fantastic speech explaining how we all feel likefrauds. He looked at me, c, “Why would that be interesting?” Carrie and I laterjoked that the speech to the men was probably something like “How to Copein a World Where NotEveryone Is as Smart as You.”

This phenomenon of capable people being plagued by self-doubt has a name—the impostorsyndrome. Both men and women are susceptible to the impostor syndrome, but women tend toexperience it more intensely and be more limited by it.

Even the wildly successful writer and actressTina Fey has admitted to these feelings. She once explained to a British newspaper, “The beauty of theimpostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania, and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m afraud! Oh god, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!’ So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes andenjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud. Seriously, I’ve just realized that almost everyone is afraud MOOC, so I try not to feel too bad about it.”