Join us on campus in the Tyrrell Hall Auditorium February 22 at 7pm!
Imposter Syndrome is the final event in a series that highlights Tara Westover’s Educated, TU’s 2023-24 Common Read. Click the link here to learn more.
OCH will welcome Dr. LaShawnda Fields to campus to discuss Imposter Syndrome, its causes, and ways to persevere through its negative effects.
Fields is a native of St. Louis, MO where she completed both her Ph.D. and MSW degree at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Her current research focuses on the culture and climate within social work education pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Before returning to school, Fields worked at Washington University as the Diversity in Retention Coordinator. In this role, she primarily worked with and supported first-generation and low-income students during their trek to graduate. As a staff member, she volunteered across campus in many diversity-related capacities.
Dr. Fields’s lecture will coincide with themes explored in this year’s common read, Tara Westover’s Educated. In the memoir, Westover recounts her feelings of doubt—and her work to persevere through those doubts—as she attends college and learns to navigate educational and social environments completely different from the insular world of her childhood. Westover tells of the conflicts that arise between achievement and belonging in higher education; despite winning a prestigious fellowship to study abroad at Cambridge University and doing well there, she still feels she does not belong. She writes,
“in April I began to do well. I wrote an essay on John Stewart Mill’s concept of self-sovereignty, and my supervisor, Dr. David Runciman, said that if my dissertation was of the same quality, I might be accepted to Cambridge for a PhD. I was stunned: I, who had sneaked into this grand place as an imposter, might now enter through the front door” (267).
Westover did not attend any elementary or secondary school, and that fact makes her distrust her own capabilities throughout Educated. However, later in the book, professors and advisors inspire Westover to maintain her passion for learning. By acknowledging her limitations without effacing her own unique point of view, she shows there may be ways of combating Imposter Syndrome.
Feeling out of place, nervous, and unqualified affects most of us in one form or another—whether believing ourselves ill-equipped to navigate a challenging conversation with a loved one or feeling beyond the pale in a new career position. As a doctor in social work, Fields will expound on the many tools one can use to deal with the symptoms of Imposter Syndrome.
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