“Forward Propagation Pattern Prediction, Polyspecies Facial Recognition, and Complex 4D Navigation with Multipath Convolutional Neural Networks” was the title of Mayla’s Ph.D thesis in computer science. On this stormy Tuesday afternoon she finished presenting her defense in front of a room of ten quiet onlookers. She smiled at the nod of approval from her thesis advisor, then left the room.
Moments later, while sitting in her cubicle eating the first bites she had eaten all day, she was greeted by her Ph.D committee, three professors of computer science and a professor of electrical engineering, who congratulated her for successfully defending her thesis. One by one they shook her hand, said flattering words, and wished her all manner of success in a promising future. The Ph.D was now hers. Here is victory. Here is a sudden silence in the head.
So ended the six years of indentured servitude to the university computer science department, the six years of parallel servitude to the Institute for Advanced Computational Sciences, and so ended, in her now quiet mind, the six years of poverty and anxiety. The future was hers. No more nights that bleed into days, no more days that smear into weeks, no more throbbing pangs of anxiety and stress stealing away her sleep and her moments of calm. No more uncertainty. No more endless tunnels with no end in sight. No more feelings of being left behind, forgotten, imprisoned away in a dungeon while the world turned and her family and peers established their lives in the bright world above. She was finished. She would join the world above and become part of the moving Earth.
In the months following graduation, Mayla had no prospects for work. This was by design, for she had come off six years of work that gave her little time for rest or uninterrupted pleasure. The nature of this work prevented her from many a comfortable day or night, and even possessed her consciousness during her free time. Work was the farthest thing from her mind. By luck, Mayla had saved enough money during her time in graduate school to live comfortably for half a year. That half a year was spent basking in a large responsibility void and a hyper-focused entertainment frenzy. What friends hadn't left town to begin adventures in the world partied with her. It wasn't long before the few who remained to party had gone.
As her bank account deflated and her months of leisure had become less comfortable, Mayla began applying for jobs. She researched her prospects. Academia? The greater part of the last decade had shown her what her future looked like if she went down that road. All work, no play, and little money can only be profitable when the work is one's dream, she reckoned. Industry? This was a new and exotic world to her, one with limitless possibility and opportunity. What lies here? She researched jobs and the market, she updated her CV and her resume, she found requisitions that fit her interests and her experience, and she wrote cover letter after cover letter, submitted application after application. In the weeks that followed, as she sought entry to a new world she didn't understand, she slowly drifted back into the shadows of old thoughts -- the nagging imposter that had always crept around in her mind, right below her conscious activity.
Her first years in college studying a subject she was fascinated with but not familiar with, surrounded by people who sounded like they knew what they were talking about, boys and men who could talk confidently about programming and software and math and things she wanted to learn but had little knowledge of, these first years had given birth to this imposter inside her. She was an outsider hoping to come in, with little experience and even less confidence in what she knew. She did not belong here. Yet, the days and nights of dedication gradually brought her into the circle, granted her as much esteem and sense of place as those she once looked up to. Was it luck, maybe? Had her good performance been a fluke? The next test would surely strike her down and reveal her hidden identity. But it did not. Nor did the next. To develop real mastery of the subject, she became involved in research. This would be it. This would be the decision that leads to her downfall, and to everyone around her finding her out as the fraud she was.
But it was not to be. Her graduation and entry into graduate school saw a repeat of this self-inflicted mental punishment. This is it, she realized. This new place, these harder classes, these perceptive peers, these harsher professors, these additional barriers to advancement, this more involved and time consuming research, these will be the nails in my coffin -- the coffin of my false identity. The imposter will be revealed.
Here she was, the greater part of a decade later, and her shroud had never been removed, her imposter within never revealed. She was aware of academic articles on the imposter syndrome. She knew what it was, she knew it was a vague notion shared by many, she knew it didn't mean anything. Though, she thought, there must be those whose feelings of being an imposter carry some truth. Even if only a small minority, some of those suffering the syndrome may in fact be imposters. And I am probably in that minority.
Some of Mayla's applications and cover letters resulted in telephone interviews. Many did not. Some of the telephone interviews resulted in second telephone interviews. Many did not. Some of the second telephone interviews resulted in emails with a list of problems and challenges for Mayla to complete in order to prove her mettle against a ticking clock. Many did not. Some of the dozen-page reports Mayla had put together over a number of days as her solution to the email problems resulted in weeks of creeping silence, followed by immediate flights out to distant corners of the country for in-person interviews in which she would give a presentation over an obscure technical topic requiring further days of preparation. Many did not. None of the in-person interviews and presentations resulted in job offers.
It's happened, she realized. It took a long time, but here it is. They've found me out. I was almost convinced it wouldn't happen. The people I've interviewed with have done what no one else could: they’ve seen through my disguise. The imposter has been revealed.
The events just described, together with the internal strife just explained, became the new pattern of Mayla’s life. Had I known this is what awaited me after school, she thought, I would have stayed put. The cover letter writing and problem solving and presentation preparation leading to red-eye flights and all-day travel and interviews and presentations almost had Mayla feeling as though she were back in school, toiling in a whirlpool that never deviates.
The endless whirlpool produced vertigo, suffocation, and sickness. To calm the nerves, Mayla tried drinking, which gradually increased in volume until it caused more problems than it alleviated. This was no good. She cut out drinking. She tried board games, but games were a distraction that didn’t help. She turned to more and more obscure ideas, like tarot cards and potion making, which were fun, but again, were simply distractions, an attempt to crawl deep into a mental hole away from the surface world. The anxiety of job seeking took its toll.
The idea came from a movie, she didn’t know which one because she saw it in so many, to start smoking cigarettes. Maybe it was an old movie or a European movie. Very likely a black and white French movie. In her thirties and having never touched a cigarette, Mayla decided it was time to start. But the mundane, run of the mill gas station cigarettes wouldn’t do it for her; they were too pedestrian, too every-day and common, uninteresting.
After some research, Mayla decided that her leap into the exciting world of cigarette smoking would be performed with Muratti Ambassador cigarettes, once upon a time from Italy, and thus suitably exotic. Discovering that Andy Warhol had painted advertisements for these cigarettes became additional validation of her decision, for it lent the Ambassador that extra cool artsy factor she had already associated with cigarettes. The real benefit in this new hobby was that it helped to allay her anxiety, to soften the rugged peaks of her mountains of stress and and to shallow out the deep troughs of hopelessness.
Money for foreign cigarettes wasn’t growing on trees. The squeeze of dwindling financial resources strained Mayla beyond the strains she was used to prior to unemployment. Industry jobs weren’t happening.
Her years chasing a PhD in science had transformed Mayla into a mentally powerful titan, with fortitude and endurance and resilience beyond measure, imbuing her with a seemingly superhuman perseverance, agility, ability for abstraction, and internal command, control, and commitment. She tapped into these powers. She kept her chin up, defied any sense of defeat or exhaustion or poverty, and wrote new cover letters and research interest summaries and applied for academic jobs, postdoctoral positions with little pay and even smaller prospects. Her future was looking a lot like her past, the past from which she was attempting to distance herself. But small money is money, and money pays for cigarettes and pays rent and buys happiness.
The exciting thing about academic jobs is that they require recommendation letters. Mayla wrote to her professors and others she had worked for in her years as an indentured servant, requesting recommendations be forwarded to promising sounding labs and universities she had applied to. Weeks passed, and Mayla followed up with the hiring professors and scientists at the institutions she had applied to. They reported that her recommendation letters had been quite disappointing.
“Your professors do not remember who you are, and cannot say anything useful about your research and your work. We cannot hire you with these recommendations. Good luck in your job search.” This recurred a handful of times before all was quiet.
After weeks of silence it occurred to Mayla that there might be an easier way to go about finding a job, one that took up less of her time, depended less on other people, and would allow her to use the very skills she had mastered over the past decade. She wrote a neural network to automate her applications, teaching the algorithm how to put together the right application and cover letter based on the job requisition. Using these job requisitions and her own applications and cover letters as training data, she built an artificial intelligence that would seek out jobs across the internet, based anywhere in the country, and would put together a cover letter appropriate to the description, from a pool of her talents and knowledge. She took parts of the code she had written in school and reworked it for a new purpose.
She trained the algorithms for days on her examples. It was concocting almost realistic-sounding cover letters, accurately filling out application forms and submitting required documentation. Soon it would be able to put together email responses and follow-ups. In a few more weeks her job-seeking endeavor would be hands off.
Let’s jump forward to those future weeks. By this point all her responses had been automated, and she could perform basic interviews with a trained voice algorithm that cut her out of the job-seeking process entirely. Mayla received callbacks and interviews and she slept through all of them, tired from the development and the endless nights of perfecting her algorithmic process. With the addition of third party tools to her arsenal, the entire application process, even in-depth telephone interviews, had become completely accomplished by AI.
Eventually Mayla accepted the job for which her applications and interviews showed she was best qualified. A job as a riverboat captain in the Mississippi Delta was now hers, with all the fanfare to welcome her that could be expected. On her boat's maiden voyage she took gamblers onto the river and cruised through the gator-filled waters with a piano player lighting his keys on fire with Mississippi lightning. This new chapter of her life would be a computerless wonderland, an adventure devoid of algorithms, absent all the late night screen time and humorless walls of code. A new life had begun.
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