I need some new role-models

Hearing everyone's voices on these Snapvine players that people have been putting on their blogs has given me a complex.

Listening to them last night, and then to my own recording below, I was completely overcome with imposter syndrome. Youse guys all sound like professors. And I sound like a little kid. What am I doing even thinking I can be a real academic like the rest of you?

But because I overthink things, I lay awake a long time last night trying to work out what exactly made me think you all sounded more like real people than I did. And I reckon I've found the answer: I have never known a professor with a New Zealand accent.

Even in my undergraduate years in New Zealand, the only New Zealanders I was ever taught by were one prof for French and one for German. And they taught in French and German respectively, so I never heard them professoring in a New Zealand accent. The great majority of the rest were Americans and a few were Brits. (I'm judging by their accents here. I never interrogated them about their citizenship, so it's possible they were NZers by birth who spent a long time working overseas).

Here there is one Australian faculty member in our department, but she works in an area so far removed from mine (both in the physical and metaphorical sense) that I almost never interact with her. Otherwise they are mostly Americans and Canadians, with a Russian and a few Brits thrown in for good measure. My entire committee is American.

I guess there are enough Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates interested in a quiet life in Australia that my university never has to settle for employing people from our own system. You know, I think every faculty member in our department (apart from the one Australian) came from Harvard, MIT, Oxford or Cambridge. Which is nice for students from the point of view of having smart people teaching and supervising us. But not so nice when we start thinking about our own chances of being employed here.

And I think it has led to me subconsciously spending the last 10 years internalising a belief that American accent = professor, New Zealand/Australian accent = student. Which is why you all sound like "real academics" to me, and I sound like a fake.