Becoming “Member Enough”: The Experience of Feelings of Competence and Incompetence in the Process of Becoming a Professor

The graduate teaching assistant prepares to enter a classroom for the first time as its instructor beset by feelings of incompetence: indeed, learning to successfully display a professional identity is often a terrifying experience, such that promising novices may abandon it prematurely. This hermeneutic phenomenological study asks one female doctoral candidate the following question: What is the experience of feelings of competence and incompetence in the process of becoming a professor? The core finding of this interview-based study is the thematic demarcation of sequential stages in the participant’s experience of the process of becoming “member enough”. In the presentation of the findings, the identification of the central themes is validated with excerpts from the interview data, and their implications for the study of competence, the sociocultural study of identity development, and the mentoring of pre-service college faculty discussed. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, May 2010, Volume 10, Edition 1