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Talk about a time when you experienced imposter syndrome and how did you overcome it?

  • 1.  Talk about a time when you experienced imposter syndrome and how did you overcome it?

    Posted 02-13-2020 10:10 AM
    Plot Points is a podcast by ASCE that tells the robust story of civil engineering one episode at a time. The podcast is in Season 3 and is looking for answers for their Member Memo questions. An upcoming question is the following: Talk about a time when you experienced impostor syndrome. How did you overcome it?

    If interested in a chance to be featured on a future episode of the podcast, record your answer as a voice memo on your phone (60 seconds or so) and email it to ascenews (at ) asce.org with "Member Memo" in the subject line! I submitted an answer to one of the featured questions during Season 1 so feel free to respond here or message me with any questions about the process.
    If not interested in recording a voice memo for the podcast, I would love to hear about your experiences below. 

    To start the discussion, I often experience impostor syndrome. My most recent notable story is from this past summer when I received an email from our company's Marketing Manager. This email mentioned that Anthony Fasano would be coming to our office to record a few videos and that I was tapped to be one of the people he would interview! My immediate reaction was 'absolutely not, I would be terrible at this, plus what would I even talk about as I'm only two years out of college..' and other similar thoughts filled my head. Thankfully, instead of immediately responding to the email with my initial reaction and declining the offer, I let it sit and thought about it some more and consulted some of my colleagues and mentors about the opportunity. In this case, hearing encouragement from others was exactly what I needed to rise above my self-doubt and say yes to the opportunity even if it seemed outside my comfort zone. So I eventually said yes and the recording went much better than my initial reaction of how I expected it would go (with of course a bit of preparation on my end) and the final video is now up on YouTube!


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    Danielle Schroeder EIT, A.M.ASCE
    Associate Engineer
    Pennoni Associates
    Philadelphia PA
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