“Look up when you’re walking, kid!”

A man yelled at me for stumbling into his path while I was on my way to my first class at Yale University. At the time, I didn’t take what he said to heart. After all, I was busy battling the butterflies in my stomach: First Day of Class (FDOC) was upon us.

After about an hour of not really paying attention in class, I drifted into one of Yale’s fourteen dining halls.

Inside, it felt like a movie set someone had forgotten to turn off. Long wooden tables. Stained glass windows. Soft chatter bouncing off high ceilings. An entire wall of food: cereals I’d only seen in YouTube vlogs, three types of milk, labels that said things like “vegan,” “local,” “sustainably sourced.” Students in college sweatshirts moved around me like they’d rehearsed this scene for years.

I froze somewhere between the salad bar and the dessert table.

Back home in Colombo, lunchtime meant a neatly packed box from my mother: rice, curry, maybe something fried if she’d had the time. Here, people were building bowls—quinoa, kale, chickpeas—like they were curating their music playlists. At the next table, a group compared pre-orientation trips: “my backpacking program,” “my humanities thing,” “the lab I worked at this summer.” Someone casually mentioned “my summer at Harvard,” like it was just another beach trip.

All I could think was: They made a mistake with me.

There’s a particular texture to imposter syndrome. It’s not one loud thought; it’s a quiet, constant hum. A little voice that follows you around whispering: not enough. Not smart enough, not rich enough, not polished enough, not American enough. At Yale, it showed up in small, precise ways.

It was there when I opened the online course catalog for the first time. My classmates talked about “shopping” classes the way you scroll through Netflix, saying things like, “Oh, I’ve been following this professor since my junior year of high school,” or, “I’ve been wanting to study this niche topic for years.” I had twelve tabs open and a growing headache. Every course description sounded like it had been written for someone else—someone who’d been reading philosophy at sixteen, doing research in school labs, joining debate teams with sought-after coaches and travel budgets. Later, I learned there’s a name for that sense that everyone else already knows the script: the hidden curriculum. All the unwritten rules and norms of American colleges—how to pick classes strategically, what questions to ask your instructor, which internships quietly open doors—seemed to live in everyone else’s heads. I was still trying to find the table of contents.

It was there when a professor went around the room on the first day, asking us to introduce ourselves.

“My name is X, I did a gap year working on macroeconomic policy.”
“I’m Y, I’ve been doing machine learning research on language models.”
“I’m Z, I helped build an educational nonprofit in high school.”

When it was my turn, I said my name, my city, my intended major. That was it. My voice felt too loud and too soft at the same time. I could hear my Sri Lankan accent clearly, suddenly aware of every consonant and every vowel dragging my sentence down word by word.

That night, I did what most of us do when we feel out of place: I opened Instagram.

My Yale feed was full of wide lawns, fairy lights, and new friends posing in front of college gates. Meanwhile, my Sri Lankan feed showed my friends in uniform, carrying umbrellas in the rain, sitting in crowded tuition classes, dodging stray dogs on the way home. I thought of my O/L classrooms with broken windows and fading timetables pinned to the wall. I remembered our school library with books older than my parents.

Then the question crept in quietly, and once it arrived, it wouldn’t move: Why me, and not them?

For the first few weeks, I tried to answer that question by working twice as hard. Sometimes thrice. I woke up early to reread readings I barely understood the first time. I triple-checked every email to a professor, terrified of sounding unprofessional or clueless. I laughed along when people joked about “legacy kids” and “feeder schools,” even though I’d just Googled what those terms meant.

On paper, I was doing fine. I submitted assignments on time. I nodded in lectures. I even raised my hand once or twice, my heart pounding so loudly I could feel it in my ears. But inside, I was waiting for the axe to fall with a tap on the shoulder.

“Sorry, there’s been a mistake. We didn’t mean to let you in.”

The turning point didn’t come as a big win or a perfect grade. It came on an ordinary Tuesday in a small seminar room.

The class was about education and inequality—ironically, the one space where my background was supposed to help me feel like I belonged. That day, we were discussing an article about standardized testing. The conversation floated comfortably around SAT scores, private tutors, prep courses, different “tiers” of schools.

Then the professor paused.

“What does this look like in other countries?” she asked, scanning the room. Her eyes landed on me and my t-shirt spelling out ‘International Orientation.’ “What about where you’re from?”

I felt twenty pairs of eyes tilt towards me. My instinct was to shrink, to say something vague and safe. The familiar script started playing in my head: Say something smart. Don’t ramble. Don’t mess this up. You don’t really know enough anyway.

But that day, I was too tired to perform. 

So I told the truth.

I talked about students in Sri Lanka sharing borrowed textbooks, covering them in brown paper to make them last longer. I talked about memorizing entire marking schemes because that’s how you survive high-stakes exams. I described brilliant classmates who never even thought of applying abroad because the process felt like a secret language reserved for “other” people. I told them about the late-night messages from younger students, asking how to navigate scholarships, essays, visas, everything.

For the first time since arriving, I wasn’t trying to sound like I belonged—I was just communicating the reality of where I was from.

When I finished, the room went quiet. The good kind of quiet.

Then a classmate spoke. “I’ve never thought about exams that way before,” she said. “Thank you for sharing that.” Someone else scribbled notes like my life was suddenly material for their paper. The professor nodded.

“That,” she said, “is exactly why your voice matters in this room.”

It was a simple sentence. But something shifted.

Imposter syndrome had been telling me a clean, elegant lie: that belonging at Yale was about how well I could imitate everyone else. That my job was to erase the rough edges of my story and fit neatly into theirs.

That day, I started to understand something else: Yale hadn’t admitted me despite my story. It had admitted me because of it.

The things that made me feel out of place—the public-school classrooms, the uneven internet, the nights spent writing scholarship essays on my phone, the work I did with students back home—weren’t flaws to hide. They were data points. Perspective. Expertise.

Of course, the imposter voice didn’t just pack its bags and leave after that class. It showed up again when I got my first disappointing grade. It whispered when people talked about their parents’ Ivy League legacies. It screamed when I sat in front of a problem set that looked like it had been written in hieroglyphs.

But gradually, I learned to answer back.

I started a folder on my laptop called “Evidence.” Inside: screenshots of messages from students I’d mentored, short notes from professors, photos from workshops back home. A sentence from an email that said, “Your perspective was incredibly valuable in class today.” Whenever the “you don’t belong here” voice got too loud, I opened that folder. I reminded myself: I am not just a lucky fluke. I have receipts.

I also began treating Yale less like a jury and more like a toolbox. Instead of constantly asking, “Do I deserve to be here?” I tried reframing the question, “How can being here help me serve the people I care about?” That small act of cognitive reappraisal changed the way I carried myself on campus.

Seeking help from professors during office hours became less intimidating when I realised I wasn’t only asking questions for myself. I was collecting answers I could carry back to Colombo, to students who still studied under flickering lights and broken fans. Readings felt less abstract when I imagined how these ideas might fit into real classrooms with real kids whose names I actually knew.

Bit by bit, I gave myself permission to take up space. I corrected the pronunciation of my name—politely, but firmly. I mentioned Sri Lanka in class, not as an exotic example but as a central case. I found other international, first-generation, and low-income students and discovered something comforting: almost all of us, at some point, felt like we’d snuck into a party we weren’t actually invited to.

One evening, walking back from the library, I passed the exact spot where that stranger had once yelled, “Look up when you’re walking, kid!”

This time, I did.

I looked up and saw Yale’s signature Collegiate Gothic arches, the dramatic dusk-bound sky, the windows glowing in shades of yellow and orange. I thought about the kid I had been on FDOC, staring at the pavement, convinced that if anyone looked too closely, they’d see right through me. I thought about the messages from home: “How did you get there?” “Do you think someone like me could?”

And I realised that looking down had never actually protected me. It had only made me smaller.

Imposter syndrome still visits—before big presentations, during difficult classes, when I’m about to hit “submit” on something that matters. But when it shows up now, I remember that quiet Tuesday in the seminar room. I remember the nod from my professor, the thank-you from a classmate.

Most of all, I remember that my story, my accent, my raw hunger for recognition—all the things that got me into Yale in the first place that I used to try to smooth out—are not evidence against me. They’re exactly what I’m here to bring.

So I lift my head, take a breath, and keep walking.