The Bhagavad Gita opens with the most capable warrior in the battle dropping his bow.
Not because Arjuna lacks skill. He’s spent his entire life becoming the best at this. The problem is the opposite. He can see, with perfect clarity, exactly what’s at stake, what he might get wrong, and what failure would cost. His awareness of the difficulty has outpaced his confidence in his own capability. He asks Krishna for guidance not because he doesn’t know anything. He asks because he can see how much is at stake and he doesn’t trust that what he knows is enough.
That’s not weakness. That’s what real competence feels like at the edge of itself.
I think about this every time a first-year CSE cohort hits month two, and the impostor syndrome arrives in exactly the students you’d least expect it.
The students who feel it most
The students who fall hardest into impostor syndrome in first year are rarely the weakest ones. They’re the ones who, a month ago, were the technical reference point for everyone around them. The student who figured out the bug others gave up on. The one who understood the concept before the teacher finished explaining. The person everyone turned to when the code broke.
They arrive. Something shifts.
Every person around them has also been that person. The cohort has students who’ve built projects that impressed people, who are running daily DOJO practice, who are writing real code in the first month. The reference point for “capable” that this student carried from school doesn’t tell them anything useful anymore.
Here’s what happens next. The student becomes acutely aware of everything they don’t know. They can see the gap between what they’re producing and what they understand good engineering to actually be. And because they’re sharp, the gap they can see is large.
Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, the psychologists who first described impostor syndrome in 1978, identified something specific: the phenomenon clusters in high-achieving people who attribute their success to luck or to successfully hiding what they don’t know, despite evidence to the contrary. The feeling isn’t evenly distributed. It concentrates in the people who are paying close enough attention to notice the gap.
The students who feel nothing in first year are often the ones who don’t yet understand the scope of what they’re attempting. The students who feel the gap most sharply are usually the ones who see it most clearly.
Impostor syndrome in first year isn’t a signal that you’re in the wrong place. It’s often the opposite.
What’s actually happening
There’s a pattern in how competence develops that shows up across disciplines.
As skill builds, your awareness of what you don’t know tends to grow faster than the skill itself, for a while. You reach a point where you know enough to see how much is missing, but not yet experienced enough to hold that gap with any steadiness. The distance between those two things feels, from the inside, like being found out.
It isn’t. It’s the address of real learning.
K. Anders Ericsson, who spent decades studying expert performance, described growth as happening at the edge of current ability. Not below it, where things feel manageable. At the edge, in the zone that’s hard enough to require genuine effort and grounded enough to allow progress. That zone is uncomfortable. The discomfort isn’t evidence you’re wrong. It’s the structure of how the skill builds.
The learning-how-to-learn piece on this blog covers the research in depth, Bjork’s desirable difficulties, Ebbinghaus, Ericsson’s deliberate practice. The specific point here is narrower: in first year, the discomfort of not yet trusting what you’re building is not a signal to reassess your right to be here. It’s a signal that something real is being built.
The full learning-science argument is in the C5 cluster pillar. This piece is about what it feels like to be inside that argument, from the student’s side, in month two.
What reassurance doesn’t do
The instinctive response to a student feeling like a fraud is reassurance. “You’re doing fine. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Everyone feels this.”
Reassurance feels kind. It’s also structurally insufficient.
A student experiencing impostor syndrome isn’t suffering from a shortage of encouragement. They’re suffering from a shortage of signal. Every day, they’re producing work, making decisions, and getting no reliable feedback on whether what they produced was any good, where it fell short, or what they should do differently. Without that feedback, the feeling has nothing to resolve against. It just accumulates.
What actually changes it isn’t “you’re fine.” It’s: here is your specific work, and here is specific feedback on it, and here is what to do next.
Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice is clear on why. The difference between practice that builds expertise and practice that doesn’t isn’t volume. It’s whether specific, actionable feedback arrives close enough to the attempt that the student can use it. Practice without that feedback produces repetition. Practice with it produces growth. The student who feels like a fraud needs the second kind, not more of the first.
The structural response to impostor syndrome in first year isn’t pastoral. It’s architectural.
What the architecture actually looks like
Here’s what the design does, concretely.
The DOJO runs daily coding practice across languages, with six belt levels per language, each requiring demonstrated performance before the next opens. The point of the belt structure isn’t the belts. It’s that a student always knows where they actually stand and what the next step specifically is. They’re not in an undifferentiated sea of things they haven’t mastered. They have a position. They can see the next rung.
That matters for impostor syndrome specifically. The feeling feeds on the absence of reliable ground. Daily practice with a clear progression gives the student ground. Here’s what I can do. Here’s what I’m working toward. Here’s what happened in yesterday’s attempt.
Squads structure the peer layer. Students work through the same challenges at overlapping stages. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s research on communities of practice found that learning alongside people at slightly different stages of the same discipline is qualitatively different from learning in isolation. Watching someone a few steps ahead navigate the difficulty you’re stuck on provides something encouragement can’t: evidence that the difficulty is actually navigable.
Mentors review work close to when it happens. HEROS, the real-time learning monitoring system, identifies gaps early so mentors can step in before a student has spent weeks in unproductive struggle without any response. The point isn’t oversight. It’s density of care. A student shouldn’t go more than a few days in the wrong kind of difficulty without someone noticing.
Together, these don’t eliminate the feeling. What they do is reduce the distance between the feeling and the feedback that makes it navigable. That’s the design target.
A closing
Arjuna’s crisis at Kurukshetra isn’t resolved by Krishna telling him he’s more capable than he thinks. Krishna tells him to act. The action is the resolution. The paralysis dissolves not through reassurance but through engagement with the actual thing in front of him.
The learning-science version is less poetic, but it says the same thing. You can’t think your way through impostor syndrome in first year. You can’t be reassured through it. You produce work, receive specific feedback on it, do the next thing, and let the accumulated weight of that process replace uncertainty with the experience of having built something you can stand behind.
That’s what first year is for. Not to be easy. To produce the conditions where the doing becomes possible.
I still have to remind myself of this, some weeks, in my own work.
Deepak is a co-founder of Kalvium. He writes at the intersection of education design, philosophy, and how engineering careers are actually built. For the learning-science argument underneath this piece, see why engineers who struggled early often outperform.