It’s been a while since I last wrote here. Life got busy the way it does when you’re finishing a thesis: looming deadlines, existential spirals, the realization that the end product barely resembles what you initially envisioned. But one year after the defense, I can’t seem to shake off the feeling that despite years of supposed specialization, I am a specialist at….nothing.
When you start a doctorate degree, there’s an implicit promise dangled: at the end of it, you will be an expert. You will know a niche topic in more depth than most. In some narrow technical sense, that’s true. But the further I went into the depths of academia, the more I discovered the vast, humbling expanse of what I didn’t know and never might. Every journal article raised ten new questions. Every theory/claim, on closer inspection, was contested, provisional, or held together with assumptions.
So I emerged from the degree not with the swagger of expertise, but a doubled-down imposter syndrome. Who am I to call myself an expert? I feel like a generalist now, more than ever.
Reflecting on this, what the PhD did teach me was perhaps not the subject-matter expertise, but the ability to pick up a topic, learn it critically, move within/across research methods without panicking, and read something completely unfamiliar to reach a reasonable depth of understanding. It helped develop the intuition for spotting shaky and poorly-evidenced arguments. Perhaps that’s the gift of the degree, buried under all the citations, codes, articles and jargon: not complete expertise in a subject (which is arguably unattainable), but learning how to learn.
On this topic, I read a book last year titled Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. The author’s argument was that in a world obsessed with early specialization, generalists who sampled widely, worked across domains, and made broader connections across topics that their highly specialized peers couldn’t make were better primed to succeed (in certain situations). Perhaps it was confirmation bias, but the book helped me reframe being a generalist not as a failure, but as a real strength. It did, however, lead me to a more uncomfortable question: how much of what we call expertise is real knowledge versus performative?
I ask this because I struggled with performance of expertise, especially in academia: the confident tone, the well-placed jargon, the name-dropped theorist, or the firm refusal to say “I don’t know”. Early-career researchers are pushed into performing expertise that they don’t feel yet by a system that rewards it ruthlessly. One quickly learns that hedging gets you talked over, being unsure reads as weakness in a job talk, that the confident voice gets the question time at a conference. Afterall, the pressure to publish or perish while clinging to a precarious position in a competitive job market doesn’t exactly incentivize honesty about the limits of knowledge. So, one learns to project that expertise, no matter how unnatural it feels. The strangest part is that the confidence to occupy that expertise seems to be distributed along the same hierarchical lines of who has been made to feel they belong at the table.
Perhaps this is what sociologist Erving Goffman called the presentation of self, wherein we all manage our front stage persona and stage ourselves for an external audience to maximize our rewards (in saying this, I just fell prey to my own critique and name-dropped a theory!).
So if expertise is (atleast partly) performative, then the people who perform it most convincingly need not always be the ones who understand it most deeply. They could simply be people who were trained, owing to their background and privilege, to sound certain. The quieter, honest thinkers, or the ones genuinely grappling with how much they don’t know, could get dismissed as less competent.
On the other hand, it feels like the more genuine experts wear their expertise lightly. They’re often the first to say “that’s outside my area,” admit what they don’t know, or get visibly excited when someone asks a question that they (or the discipline broadly) can’t answer. True expertise seems to come with humility rather than in spite of it. This is of course a sweeping generalization and likely heavily correlated with personality traits, but worth deliberating on.
So how can we prioritize real expertise versus a performative one, especially when the system expects and rewards the latter? I, as always, don’t have silver-bullet answers, but do have suggestions:
If you’re a fellow impostor: Perhaps it’s best to separate content expertise from learning expertise. One may not be the world authority on the topic, but the ability to enter a new field, orient oneself, and reach reasonable depth travels everywhere. In an increasingly AI-driven world, perhaps that’s the real strength.
If you’re someone who is an expert: Please normalize the limits of knowledge. Every time an expert models intellectual humility, it gives the imposter-suffering researcher permission to stop performing. Some experts seem to do this instinctively, and the effect is extraordinary.
My main takeaway is that the moment we stop performing certainty is the moment we really start to think. So that will be the starting point: honest about intellectual limits and ready to think out loud (again) about policy on this blog. Stay tuned!
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