A Reflection from my 2020 Self Portrait by Sid Naidu
By: Sid Naidu
Tags: Imposter Syndrome, Education Reform, Leadership, Personal Development, International Development

The work from home / zoom call self portrait to represent 2020

This might be the most authentic self portrait I could have taken to represent my year.

I went from international development research to a masters application, zoom calls to webinars, job searches to career pivots, content creation to personal reflection, creative coaching to grant writing.

“You are not working from home. You are at your home, in a crisis, trying to work.”

Was this the realist thing I could hear this year?

I’ve developed an unhealthy habit of 12 hour work days again, typical of that first generation immigrant hustle story. I tell myself it’s probably better than past few years of burning out and loosing complete focus, but who the hell am I kidding? This is what usually leads to that very same burn out.

I learned some time ago that if you break your year into business quarters you might just sound like you know what you’re doing.

Quarter 1

I locked myself down months before the first lockdown to bang my life out into a masters application. I was applying to what I saw as the top international affairs school in Canada, immediately after a full year of working myself stupid to get an honours GPA from a college graduate certificate and a heavy extra curricular activity list to go along with it.

I don’t recall exactly when I got the noreply@ email of rejection but I wasn’t bitter about it, I just asked for feedback and set my mind to try again next year. However, it was the feedback which I later got that wasn’t sitting quite right.

When I was told that it was my “barely got by” grades from 10 years ago that didn’t make the cut, I got the very real feeling that they may have not even got to my written application. It didn’t matter that since then I put in 10 years of solid work where I self funded my own experiences to be base overseas and It didn’t matter that I went back to full time school to study for the development field and graduated with honours.

In that moment I felt like I was being judged for my own challenges I faced as a first generation student trying to navigate post secondary education and life. I’ll take full ownership and be the first to say that I was a shitty undergraduate student when it came to academics. What I lacked in grades however, I completely destroyed with an achievement list of leadership & community building activities.

In all honesty, when my I look at my undergrad I acknowledge struggling to find meaning in learning about subjects like European history because I couldn’t connect with it. I’m saying this especially after one of my first year professor said that the less taught Eastern histories of my interest only served as a footnote in comparison.

This was 2004–2005 in the faculty of arts and I could often count the number of students of colour in my class on one hand. Going even further back as a high school student growing up in Scarborough, I had a guidance counsellor look at my dwindling grades and tell me that university probably wasn’t best for me. I wasn’t connecting with academia because I didn’t see myself there as a newcomer and when I did start feel like I belonged and proved others wrong it was because of everything I would get involved with outside the classroom.

So let’s just say that not all educators are made equally and the silver lining was that I would eventually meet the one professor who made the biggest difference in my life. He inspired me to pursue an international career and we became good friends of mine over the years after graduation.

He was also the first person in my corner that coached me on the graduate selection process. He wrote me one of the most humbling “out of this damn world” reference letters for same masters program that very possibly might have not even been read, because of my “decade ago” grade point average.

I went from 12 hour work days with international development research to submit one masters application that didn’t come back in my favour. I might have been more accepting of this fate if it was a critique on my research in my statement of interest, which I poured my soul into.

I’m not being bitter about it, in fact I knew I was taking a risk by betting it all on red, which is a highly competitive school. But if the best feedback I was given was to go back to school (this time to a university), in order to upgrade my GPA again, then I wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with the system of higher education and how we evaluate knowledge in today’s world.

Why does all this matter?

For some time now I’ve been living with the narrative that in order to get into the top agencies overseas for the international development field you need to have your masters degree as a minimum requirement. I understand the need for this prerequisite, as the complexities and nuances of navigating international affairs requires an advanced level of critical thinking that is often attributed to someone whose obtained a masters.

But I wonder if this was the right narrative to tell myself. I’m someone who has been guided by so many different lived experiences and this is what has contributed the most value to my work as a creator x changemaker. I’ve gained real world experience from being based internationally in Central America, Asia and Australia and learned from communities on the ground. I’ve graduated with honours from a grad certificate program focusing on International Development.

So I had to ask myself the question:

Why was it that I needed to obtain a masters degree before I felt I could be a professional and contribute to this field?

Imposter syndrome is something that can plague us all and becomes one of those destructive mindsets that often leads us to playing small. For me it was looking at my experiences as too informal to be professional. By having this self doubt I was excluding both my success and failures from 15 years on the grind that has contributed to my best learning and greatest accomplishments as a professional.

Perhaps it is the hidden narratives that we subconsciously tell ourselves on why we are not good enough that stop up from achieving our greatest work. Or maybe its when we are not able to see ourselves represented in certain spaces combined with the perceived judgement of others around this notion of not valuable enough.

However you want to look at it, self doubt is the true dream killer.

If you’re coming to sit at table in a room where you have to constantly prove why you deserve to be at that table, chances are that you’re in the wrong room. You are here for a reason and best path may sometimes mean that you build your own rooms and tables to sit at with others.

I don’t plan on giving up my academic pursuits and aspirations to contribute towards the development field. I’m already a professional which a vast level of expertise, so now I’m learning to how to rewrite the narrative with my own rules.

I’m still very relentless on the idea of being the first person in my family to get a masters degree and I’d like to do it for more than just that first generation immigrant hustle story. I’m doing this work so I can truly make a difference in the world around me and bring people along with me for this journey.

If you made it this far and you appreciate this story then please hit the clap on medium, let me know what you think in the comments below or share this with story others.

It’s was about the end of quarter 1 when I got the rejection email for my masters application, I wouldn’t know it at the time but the whole world would continue to be turned upside by a global pandemic. I would go from zoom call to webinar and from endless job searches to questioning the direction of my self made career.

Well, that’s another self portrait & reflection which I’ll save for another day.

Thanks for taking the time to read this story.

Sid Naidu

Creator x Changemaker