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As a Cybersecurity major in college, I've had a lot of very smart classmates who came into college with existing knowledge in the computing field. I had classmates who had been writing code since they were children, made games in their free time, and built their own custom computers. Among my brilliant peers, I was a bit of an outlier. Being brought up in a more rural environment, I didn't do much with computers until the end of high school. That was when I got my first laptop, and after a short while, I started experimenting and playing and realized that I really liked messing with operating systems.
So, when I came to college as a freshman, I was certainly no novice, but I knew I had a lot to learn. In my first programming class, I started to realize that many of my classmates had grown up with a love of computing from a young age. Imposter syndrome threatened to set in. One of my friends spent an evening soldering pins back onto a CPU he dropped. I didn't know how to solder, so I started to feel inept. Another friend wrote his own programs and uploaded them to GitHub. I had never used GitHub, was I falling behind?
I had a lot of knowledge in one specific niche: Linux operating systems. If you don't know what that is, it is like Windows or Mac, but unique in its own ways. I had spent many nights up until 3AM experimenting with Linux and becoming highly proficient in it, just because I liked it. Most of my peers did not care for Linux, and were not as proficient because they did not play with it much. However, in spite of my heightened knowledge in one specific area, I still felt like an imposter because there was still more that I didn't know than that I knew.
This is a pattern I see in many college students pursuing a Computer Science or related degree. Most of us have one niche that we're really good at, but none of us feel proficient in computing as a whole, so we must be imposters. Part of this problem is an underlying assumption that other people do have a vast knowledge of every area of computing, which is not true.
Computing is a large and ever-growing field with many different facets and niches. For college students or entry-level tech workers, this can be overwhelming. Seeing other people who have a deep knowledge of one niche can lead to the belief that everyone else knows more and we are imposters. However, there is too much there for any one person to know, and an expert in one area will be a novice in many others. You will never be an impostor if you remember that the computing field is a place for life-long learners.
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