Why do we think of impostor ‘syndrome’ as something we can beat on our own?

Emma Serisier was a scientist long before she knew it.

Whenever an animal died on the farm she shared with her mum and sister growing up in Lowanna, New South Wales, she’d perform an amateur autopsy to investigate the cause of death. Emma was so focused on poring over the organs that the blood and gore of it all never fazed her.

As a child, she’d collect tadpoles from the creek that runs through the bottom of the property, before taking them back to the house, where she’d run tests on them as they slowly became frogs.

Back then, her kind of fun involved taking batteries apart so she could learn how they worked, before cobbling them back together.

“Sometimes I’d break them and get in trouble,” the 19-year-old says, laughing: she couldn’t…