TL;DR: PhD imposter syndrome is a structural problem. The isolation, the broken feedback loops, and the demand to produce something nobody has produced before create the perfect conditions for feeling like a fraud. Pauline Clance named the feeling in 1978, and nearly fifty years of research since confirms that it hits hardest in people with the most evidence against it. The most effective intervention is not self-belief. It is being in a room with other people who feel exactly the same way.
Written by Max Lempriere, founder of The PhD People, who has worked with thousands of doctoral researchers since 2017.
Pauline Clance gave the feeling its name in 1978. She called it the imposter phenomenon. And almost half a century later, PhD students are still the population it hits hardest.
I have yet to meet a PhD student who didn’t feel it at one point or another. Most feel it most of the time. The 2019 Nature PhD survey of 6,320 doctoral researchers found that 36% had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their studies. A 2018 study by Evans and colleagues, published in Nature Biotechnology, estimated that graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression and anxiety as the general population. Imposter feelings sit underneath a lot of those numbers.
Even when the evidence is on your side, the grades, the publications, the milestones, the supervisor feedback, you can still hand the credit to luck, or to your supposed talent for fooling everyone around you.
Here’s the thing. The feeling is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a rational response to a system that hands you an enormous, ill-defined task and then withdraws most of the feedback you would need to know whether you are doing it well.
Why imposter syndrome hits PhDs harder
Imposter feelings show up in lots of jobs. They show up especially hard in the PhD. There are three structural reasons for that, and none of them are about you.
You are working in isolation. Most PhD work happens alone. You read alone, you write alone, you analyse alone. You see your supervisor for an hour every few weeks, if you are lucky. You have no daily team to compare notes with, no colleagues finishing the same task at the same time, no easy way to know whether your output is normal, slow, fast, good or bad. Without that calibration, your inner critic fills the gap. And the inner critic is rarely generous.
You are required to produce something nobody has produced before. Every other educational stage rewards you for getting the right answer. The PhD asks you to make a novel contribution to knowledge. By definition, there is no template, no model answer, no one who has done exactly your project before. That is the job. But it also means you spend years doing work that nobody can confirm is correct in real time. Of course you feel like a fraud. The work itself refuses to confirm you.
The feedback loops are broken. In most jobs, you do something on Monday and find out by Friday whether it landed. In a PhD, you might write a chapter in March and not get supervisor comments until June. Conference papers take six months to review. Journal articles take a year, sometimes two. By the time you find out whether your thinking was sound, you have spent half a year quietly assuming it wasn’t. The system is structurally designed to leave you in the dark.
Put those three together and the imposter feeling starts to look less like a personal failing and more like the predictable output of the environment. It isn’t a confidence problem. It’s a structural one.
You’d need to fool a lot of clever people
One of the defining features of imposter syndrome is the suspicion that you have somehow tricked the people around you into letting you get this far. Look at who those people are. Your supervisors, the admissions panel, the journal editors, the conference reviewers, the examiners on your upgrade. They are awfully smart. They have read hundreds of applications and thousands of papers. They can smell an actual fraud from a long way off.
For you to truly be an imposter, you would have had to fool all of them, repeatedly, in writing, under scrutiny, over years. That is a lot of fooling. The more honest reading is the simpler one: they had faith in you because there was something to have faith in. Have a little of that faith yourself.
You’re only human
To be human is to be fallible. You will make mistakes. You will be confused. You will feel overwhelmed. Throw a human into the PhD arena, with its workloads and its competition and its strange culture, and the fallibility goes up. You will get things wrong here. You have to, if you are going to chart a course forward.
Acting foolishly from time to time does not make you a fraud. It makes you a person doing a hard thing. There is no lie you are living. You do, in fact, deserve to be here.
Good enough for what?
If you already knew how to do the PhD, you would have been awarded one by now. You are on the journey. You are still learning the skills, still uncovering the pieces. The picture is incomplete, and that can be frightening. It is easy to feel that you are not good enough when you are knee-deep in something you cannot yet see your way out of.
You are training to be good enough. That is the whole point. You are an apprentice surrounded by people further along the path. They are not on a level playing field with you, and you are not supposed to be on a level playing field with them. Comparing your day-three to their day-three-thousand is the surest route to feeling like a fraud. It is also a category error.
What actually helps (evidence-based)
Pauline Clance’s original 1978 paper was about high-achieving women in academia and the professions. She found something that has been replicated over and over since: the people most likely to feel like imposters are the people with the most objective evidence against the feeling. A 2020 systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine looked at 62 studies and found that imposter feelings are widespread, persistent and only weakly correlated with actual ability. A 2015 study by Holly Hutchins found that even tenured faculty score high on Clance’s imposter scale. Finishing the PhD does not make it go away.
So what actually helps? The research, and my experience working with PhD students every day, points to a few things.
Naming it out loud, in front of other people who also have it. This is the single most powerful intervention in the literature. The original Clance and Imes paper found that the feeling loses much of its grip the moment a sufferer hears another high-achiever describe the same experience. Internal reassurance does not work for long. Hearing it from a peer does. This is why peer support is not a soft extra. It is the active ingredient.
Separating feelings from evidence. Clance recommended that her clients keep a written record of objective evidence: the feedback, the grades, the times someone said your work mattered. You read it back when the feeling spikes. The point is not to talk yourself out of the feeling. The feeling will still come. The point is to give your rational mind something concrete to look at while the feeling passes.
Treating the supervisor relationship as a calibration tool, not a verdict. Ask your supervisor specific, narrow questions. “Is the framing in this paragraph doing what I want it to do?” gives you usable data. “Is my work any good?” gives you anxiety. The PhD trains you to ask big questions of your topic. It also has to train you to ask small questions of your own work, so that you can collect the small reassurances you need to keep going.
Getting out of your own head, daily. The longer you sit alone with the feeling, the louder it gets. Most of the PhD students I know who have a handle on imposter syndrome have one thing in common: they write near other people most days. Not always with them, not always talking to them. Just in the same room or the same call. The presence of other people doing the same hard thing is enough to take the edge off.
Try this today
Open a blank document. Call it “evidence file”. Spend five minutes writing down every concrete piece of evidence you have that you belong on this PhD. The supervisor comment that called your introduction strong. The fact that an admissions panel chose you out of a stack of applications. The conference question you answered well. The chapter you finished even though you didn’t think you could.
Save the file somewhere you can find it. The next time the feeling spikes, open it and read it. Add to it whenever something else lands. This is not positive thinking. This is evidence-keeping, which is exactly the kind of work the PhD has trained you to do. Use the skill on yourself.
Two quotes to keep nearby
When I find myself feeling like an imposter, which is most of the time, I think of two people who, by any measure, were not frauds.
Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.” And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did.
Neil Gaiman
The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.
Albert Einstein
If Neil Armstrong and Einstein felt like frauds, the feeling cannot be a reliable guide to the truth. That is worth remembering on the days when the inner critic is loud.
You shouldn’t have to do this on your own
Here is what the Clance research keeps showing, and what I see every day. The single most powerful thing for imposter syndrome is being in a room with other PhD students who feel exactly the same way. Not in theory. In practice. Hearing someone in their fourth year, with two publications and a teaching award, say “I have no idea what I’m doing today” does more for your confidence than any pep talk a supervisor can give.
The kind of support your supervisor and department should be providing, every day, in a room full of peers, mostly does not exist in modern doctoral education. That is the structural failure. It is not yours to carry alone.
The PhD Common Room is the daily peer space we built to fill that gap. Live writing sessions every day, members from PhDs all over the world, no presentations to give, no performance required. You write near other people who know exactly what the feeling is, because they have it too. Members pay between £30 and £75 a month. There is no minimum commitment. You can cancel any time. We rarely have cancellations because, for most people, this is the first time their PhD has felt like something they share with anyone.
If today is one of the days when the inner critic is loud, you don’t need to fix yourself. You need a room with other people in it. Come and try the Common Room.
Frequently asked questions
Is imposter syndrome normal for PhD students?
Yes. Studies of doctoral researchers consistently find that imposter feelings are the norm rather than the exception, and the 2019 Nature PhD survey suggests they sit underneath a much wider mental health picture. If you feel like a fraud during your PhD, you are in the majority, not the minority.
What causes imposter syndrome in academia?
Three structural features of academic work make it especially likely. PhD work is mostly solitary, so you have nothing to calibrate against. The PhD asks you to produce something genuinely new, which means there is no model answer to confirm you are right. And the feedback loops are very slow, so you spend long stretches not knowing whether your thinking was sound. Together, these create the conditions where imposter feelings grow.
How do I deal with imposter syndrome during a PhD?
The most effective things, according to the research that began with Pauline Clance in 1978, are talking about the feeling out loud with peers who have it too, keeping a written record of objective evidence about your work, asking your supervisor narrow specific questions instead of broad ones, and not spending the whole day alone with the feeling. None of these require you to feel confident. They just require you to act anyway.
Does imposter syndrome go away after the PhD?
For most people, no. Holly Hutchins’s 2015 study found that even tenured faculty score high on Clance’s imposter scale. The feeling tends to follow people through their careers, particularly in academia. The good news is that you can learn to work alongside it rather than waiting for it to disappear.
Is imposter syndrome a sign I shouldn’t be doing a PhD?
No. The opposite, if anything. The original Clance research found that the feeling is most common in high-achievers, not in people who don’t belong. If you genuinely lacked the ability to do the PhD, you would not be feeling like a fraud. You would simply be struggling to keep up. Imposter syndrome is the cost of being competent enough to notice the gap between what you have done and what is left to do.
When does imposter syndrome become something more serious?
If the feeling is making it hard to function, if it is bound up with anxiety, depression or persistent low mood, or if it is stopping you from doing the work or seeking help, please talk to your university’s counselling service or your GP. Imposter feelings on their own are normal. Imposter feelings that are wrecking your sleep, your relationships or your ability to work are a sign to bring someone qualified into the picture.
What does PhD imposter syndrome look like for you? I’d love to hear in the comments.
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