When I started graduate school at UW-Madison, everyone was talking about “imposter syndrome.” In seminars, in teaching trainings, in hallways waiting for the classroom to open and in the dark recesses of City Bar, everyone was talking about being an imposter. Deep down we were undergraduates—for years we had been—and now, under the orders of our acceptance letters, we had to become grad students. How could we? Were we worthy? Our program selected about a dozen applicants from more than six hundred. Certainly we hadn’t mastered the theory like the others, or even the literature, and now we would need to contend with their intelligence around the rectangle. Somehow all of us felt this way: we were all imposters.

         What are my tips for graduate students? To champion difference and doubt. Eventually we stop feeling like imposters because we learn the system. We replicate those who came before. We become the people the new imposters fear. But imposter means impose, and by developing into typical graduate students who work within conventions, we allow outdated ways of writing and thinking to impose themselves on us. Instead, we could consider impostership from a different perspective. We appeared like everyone else and earned entry to the university, research funds, library stacks, and laboratories. Now that we are here, we can act like ourselves—and, hopefully, impose our unique perspectives on the environments in which we felt we needed to pretend.

         I write for the Office of Sustainability, and I have found that the students making the greatest contributions to sustainability question convention. One PhD student in the Nelson Institute asked a simple question: Why do we use historical climate data to design new buildings? If we used projected climate data, since the climate is changing, how would our buildings look, then? Other students have collected data on how much sunlight curved solar panels, rather than flat ones, might collect atop bus shelters, which hasn’t been studied before, and they have led efforts to update lighting in campus buildings. Outside of classrooms and career paths, these students look around them and question everything, as the flag outside Virgil Abloh’s (UW ’03) first solo exhibition implored.

         The Office of Sustainability attempts to increase awareness of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. It does so because it understands how much we need to act—now—in our climate crisis. Success as a graduate student doesn’t mean meeting deadlines, producing papers, conducting research, winning fellowships and grants, or even achieving degrees. It means challenging status quo—the received order of the world and most people accept. Being an imposter: imposing questions and new perspectives. And taking personal responsibility for our greatest crisis, the climate catastrophe that seems impersonal, collective, for another time. The students mentioned above each labor under a personal burden for this disaster and a personal responsibility to change how we understand and act so that we may lessen our destruction on the world. Every person, in every discipline, can take up this task.

         Here’s a tip: innovate, but for more than just ourselves. Recent developments in cryptocurrency exemplify this need. Ethereum and Bitcoin promise new autonomy, mobility, and opportunities for wealth. NFTs offer more equitable profit structures for artists, as contracts on the blockchain allow them to continue receiving royalties even when their work is resold between third parties. But a single Ethereum transaction draws as much electricity as a U.S. household in five days, according to one report, or more than 140,000 Visa transactions. One NFT sale, which lasts a few seconds, uses more electricity than an EU resident in an entire month. Bitcoin alone consumes more electricity per year than entire countries as large as the Netherlands and Chile. Reassurances of a “greener” crypto, along with pledges to “figure it out” or invest in green energy, demonstrate we are still inventing new ways to prioritize our own profits before the planet. We are like all of those who came before, assigning the apocalypse for another time. But, this time, it has arrived.

         I want us to be different. No discovery arose from sameness. Old ideas aren’t enough in the era of climate catastrophe. We need to be experimentally sustainable. 

         Tips for success are always offered in a cheery voice, but I’ve become convinced we need to occupy serious tones. We need to sound our voices with urgency. I’ve started to view Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up as a how-not-to guide for the future, tips to avoid, delivered in a range of tones. Jennifer Lawrence’s character, a graduate student who discovers the cause of the impending apocalypse, screams into the camera, “Maybe it’s supposed to be terrifying and unsettling and we should stay up all night every night crying when we’re all one hundred percent for sure gonna fucking die!” There’s comedy in this, but also the discomfort of recognition: we could be more like her, more intense, more ethical, more aware of our responsibility to this earth. These are tips for graduate students from a present future punished by extreme weather, depleted coastlines, the loss of species, and mass climate migrations. Maybe, finally, we are imposters on this planet, for centuries having explained how we care for it—even now, look how much we care—while in the end, with smiles, we ruined it. 

         Time for the experiment of obligation. Time to answer the questions Leonardo DiCaprio’s character poses before his planet collides with its certain end: “What the hell happened to us? . . . What have we done to ourselves? How do we fix it?”

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Marek Makowski writes for UW’s Office of Sustainability and teaches for its Department of English.