[Life Hack] How to Overcome the Imposter Syndrome as a Doctoral Computer Science Researcher (and Thrive)

When starting out as a doctoral researcher, I felt like an imposter: unworthy of contributing to the great corpus of academic research.

I respected my colleagues a lot—they were smarter, more knowledgeable, and more skilled. How can I make a difference in a world full of highly skilled people?

Fortunately, I watched a TED talk at the beginning of my four-year doctoral research program that changed my life. The speaker was an investment banker who achieved unbelievable things by breaking those down to its smallest components (5 to 10 minute tasks) that can be solved independently.

For example, writing a 1000-page book becomes writing one page 1000 times. Writing a 10,000 word research paper becomes writing 300 word paragraphs for 30 days. And earning $1,000,000 becomes earning $100 10,000 times.

Here’s my number one learning after finishing my four year doctoral research program:

Watch the video to learn how to finish unbelievable tasks (such as eating a plane). 🙂

After my research, I just sticked to the plan (why change a running system?) writing books, not research papers. Here’s one of my books I have written:

Check it out if you want to learn Python. The “Coffee Break Python” books are #1 and #2 Leanpub bestsellers in August 2019!

Chris

While working as a researcher in distributed systems, Dr. Christian Mayer found his love for teaching computer science students.

To help students reach higher levels of Python success, he founded the programming education website Finxter.com that has taught exponential skills to millions of coders worldwide. He’s the author of the best-selling programming books Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), The Art of Clean Code (NoStarch 2022), and The Book of Dash (NoStarch 2022). Chris also coauthored the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books. He’s a computer science enthusiast, freelancer, and owner of one of the top 10 largest Python blogs worldwide.

His passions are writing, reading, and coding. But his greatest passion is to serve aspiring coders through Finxter and help them to boost their skills. You can join his free email academy here.