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[asst_prof]

I just started my first t-t job this semester, and I've found that because I hold a Ph.D., people (students, staff, master's level faculty) expect me to know everything.  Some people might find this post funny, but it's quite unsettling (and a bit frightening) to think that others see me as being the ultimate authority on virtually everything (even things far outside of my area of expertise).  It's just a very surreal, bizarre feeling.  In making the transition from student to Ph.D. level faculty member, no one prepared me for this.  


Have any other Ph.D.s experienced this?  I'd like to hear about experiences/feelings.

[%sig%]

[Historian]

I know exactly what you mean, except I get it more often about my own field.

Yes, my PhD is in history.  No, I do not know all about the Crusades/early China/slave trade in Africa, or whatever thing you need help with.  Sure, I know a lot, but I am no expert in those areas, and I wonder if people really expect me to memorize the entirety of human history, simply because I have a PhD.

[anon4]

Vey good point, I actually feel that way myself and this perhaps has contributed in my delaying finishing my Ph.D. (I am defending very soon) (and perhaps in others, too). Specifically this idea that you ought to know everything/a lot as a Ph.D. Quite a stupid idea indeed, but rather prevelant. Think about it, one day you are ABD, and the next Ph.D. and faculty member, what can really change that fast, other than a change in persona/assumed roles. But of course as a new t-t faculty you really have to assume the new role and responsibility of the "know a lot" person in authority, which often results to perhaps experiencing an "impostor syndrome" often reported by new faculty/professionals.

But a few years of intense "training" in your new role of responsibility as a t-t faculty, further accumulation of actual experience/knowledge, and an adjustment in your thinking that you cannot possibly know everything, should help solve the problem, both in your own and in others' minds.

[Humanities prof]

What startled me wasn't so much the idea that I should know everything, but rather the differences others perceived between faculty and others in my department.  Really, I'm just another person - the title says something about me academically, but nothing more.  Yet department staff seem to feel the need to bow (metaphorically, of course!) to faculty.  I grew up in a middle class family, and know nothing about being (or at least feeling) entitled to anything.  But all of sudden I got the feeling that these people feel like I have some level of entitlement just because I have the letters Ph.D. behind my name.  If I treated them as being different from me (and especially lower than me in some way) simply because they are staff and not faculty, I couldn't live with myself.  Yet that's the exact division they are making.

[Anon]

Man, are you lucky. My students, my administrators, my wife, my parents, and my mother-in-law all think I don't have a clue about anything. LOL.

[PhD versus MD degree]

I think these is a correlation between the respect accorded people with PhDs and the respect some people hold for medical doctors.  This, I believe, stems from the fact that to have the degree MD implies that the person is an authority with regard to the functioning of the human body, and in some cases (emergencies on airplanes -- is there a doctor in the house?) has some kind of power over life and death.

The PhD degree also carries some kind of authority.  I have suffered from the imposter syndrome for a long time.  I feel vastly inferior to my colleagues, but my friends (non academics) think I am some sort of combination of genius and walking encyclopedia.  It helps that I have read widely from a young age, but it can be stressful to be thought to "know it all."  It does not help that the more I claim NOT to be a super authority in anything, the more my non-academic friends deny my denial.

In my academic life, it is not as stressful as it was in the first few years of teaching; I have become more at ease with phrases like, "that is not my area of expertise," "perhaps you should ask so-and-so -that is his/her area of specialty," or  -- in the classroom -- "of course people who specialize in  [name  of specialty] could tell you many more details about [particular topic which my area only touches on]."

[%sig%]

[anonanonanon]

Soon after I had defended my dissertation, I was chatting with an ABD friend who was saying that she couldn't remember her password to a computer account she rarely used.  I told her "oh, it's suchandsuch - they'll tell you all the passwords once you've successfully defended".  She was shocked! Of course, i then told her she had told me the password months before (I have a weird memory that way).

[Sam]

Heh... that's nothing.  There was a defunct show on NBC covering the lives of newly minted JD's.  One of the funniest scenes was when one of the characters actually said to a client, "As your lawyer..."

It's called imposter syndrome.  It's funny but you can get over it.

[tulsa]

I don't get it, Sam.  The previous postings were about how others think we are what we aren't.  Impostor syndrome is when we think we aren't what we are.  The NBC example illustrated a young lion who thought he was what he wasn't (yet).