[GeeTwo]

I have certainly experienced the Imposter Syndrome from both sides. I have been declared an "expert" in several things within a week of first hearing about them. I have also worked with a number of people who try to deny expertise despite an overwhelming flood of evidence. There is a guy I work with who has at least three times the nominal expert "10,000 hour" level of experience in his field, but because he never received a bachelor's degree, does not feel an expert. But when we get people coming in with freshly-minted PhDs and MSs, guess who becomes their mentor for the next few years?

A key thing to remember (and I don't know who said it first, though I first read it in a slightly different form from Robert Heinlein) is that: "An expert is a person from out of town with a brief case." The bottom line is that if you know a subject well enough to answer the simple questions, and know whom to ask (and have a good enough relationship to get an answer) when a problem is beyond your ken, you may well be are a de facto expert in that subject. These days, an accomplished practitioner of google-fu who learns the language of several fields and builds up some reputation on a few web sites can be a functional expert of many things. Just last week I heard (not for the first time) that there is an IT guru in my (rather technical 700+ personnel) organization whose primary skill is typing error messages verbatim into Google, and knowing to wrap them in quotes.

And now, utterly cross-threading my previous discussion, but more applicable to FRC: Once someone is recognized as an "expert" by others, Impostor Syndrome is really just a minor character flaw that leaders need to understand and work around/with. The real problem for FRC is in recruiting mentors. The key tag line is "I don't know anything about robotics." The right answer (at least for 3946) is: "Of course you don't. None of our mentors has ever done robotics before starting with FRC. But you know how to ______, don't you? We need someone who can teach the kids something about that."
___ might be something technical like software programming, building to requirements, eliciting requirements, making a mechanical system that works, or machining a bearing block. It might also be something on the business side like "sell an idea to a customer"; "make a budget"; or "run a business", or it might be on the competition side like "prepare and execute game strategy" or "keep spirit high". The bottom line is to find what each prospective mentor can add to your team, and communicate that (and the real purpose of FIRST: to inspire STEM leaders) to each in a compelling way.