Cate Roser
Imposter syndrome at Yale doesn’t hit you like you’d expect. There’s no dramatic, late-night crash out where you sob into a p-set — except when you forgot how to divide by decimals — because you feel like everyone else has read every book ever written and also cured cancer during winter break.
No, at Yale, it sneaks up on you when you least expect it — like during a casual meal at Berk or, worse, while you’re subtly eavesdropping at Brick Oven when it becomes glaringly clear that your experiences don’t quite line up with those of your classmates.
“Oh yeah, my mom really wants me to talk to them because they all went to Yale together, but I’m just not sure. I haven’t seen them since our last ski trip.”
Meanwhile, you’re over here wondering if your parents even know where Yale is on a map, much less if they rubbed elbows with the Class of ’85. While your multi-generational legacy classmates live on Parkway Ave, vacationing in Instagramable locations, you… well, live in suburban suicide, vacationing to Target for the quick daily dose of serotonin. There’s a distinct difference between weekend trips to St. Barts and weekend trips to pick up toothpaste, and yet, here we are — both somehow ending up in the same section of seminar, one of you with a fully stamped passport and the other with fully stamped CVS receipts.
This subtle, creeping feeling of not quite fitting into the Ivy League “rah-rah” bulldog mold doesn’t make you bitter, exactly. It’s not like you’re consumed with jealousy. But there’s a persistent, nagging reminder in the back of your head — you don’t fit neatly into the Yale box. You didn’t summer on Martha’s Vineyard. You didn’t intern with a friend of your parents who just so happens to be on the board of a Fortune 500 company. And no, you don’t have a close personal relationship with any of the Black Eyed Peas.
It’s these types of conversations that, let’s be honest, are far too familiar to the commoners among us. Yes, I know they casually dropped that they own a $430,000 apartment in NYC. Yes, I’ve heard about their dinner party with a former president. Yes, I’m aware they’re a nepo baby.
But I do sometimes wonder what life would be like as a nepo baby with my mother’s eyes and her agent. Would I love it? Absolutely. Who wouldn’t want the seamless VIP pass into Yale’s oh-so-sacred inner circles, where the membership card is handed out with the family trust fund? Let’s be real — access to these elite circles isn’t earned by GPA alone, but by a hefty dose of cultural capital. Sure, the academic pressure at Yale is real, but imposter syndrome? That’s not about struggling with MATH 120; it’s more about realizing you’ll never fully understand the background, the stories, or the casual picturesque vacations your classmates throw into conversation like it’s no big deal.
And then there’s that uncomfortable, smug moment when you’re at GHeav at the end of the night, and someone from a different Ivy League school — you know, the one with the unkempt lawns and overall slacker vibes… hi, Brown — accuses you of being pretentious. I mean, sure, we’re pretentious, but who’s calling the kettle black here? Since when is the bastion of “I take all my finals pass/fail” suddenly so grounded?
Imposter syndrome at Yale doesn’t just make you feel out of place — it has a funny way of making others feel like imposters, too, simply because they assume certain things about you. The moment people hear “Yale,” they start projecting ideas about who you must be: the Ivy League elitist, born and bred. Whether it’s those smokers at Brown tossing around the word “pretentious,” or, as Blair Waldorf would put it, the Princeton “trade school” students rolling their eyes, your Yale status can make them feel like they don’t measure up — like the Yale Ivy League aura you supposedly embody puts other schools on the outside looking in.
The irony, though, is that despite these wild differences, Yale has this weird way of making you feel like you belong here anyway. Maybe it’s the centuries-old Gothic architecture, or the pervasive smell of old books that makes you feel a bit smarter just by breathing in the air. But after a while, even the kid whose family name is the news starts to feel like just another person who’s stressed about finals. You realize that, for all their Aspen ski trips and $400,000 apartments, they, too, are Googling “how to pass a class you haven’t attended since the first week.”
So, how do you recover from this quiet imposter syndrome? Honestly, it’s about embracing the absurdity of it all. Lean into the fact that while your classmates’ vacations sound like something out of a Netflix documentary, you have just as much right to be here. Your journey may have involved fewer yachts and more student loans, but here you are, walking the same halls, eating the same questionable late-night food and cramming for the same exams. Yale is weird like that — despite the differences in where we have come from, at the end of four years, we will walk out through the same arches of Phelps Gate.