Am I winning?

“Would you say you’re a competitive person?”

I raised my eyebrows and looked across the desk piled high with reprints from journals at a professor at the University of Chicago. He was the second of many meetings on this visit to decide whether I should apply for graduate admission there. I thought the interview had been going well until then – I knew the right answers to the questions, and could finesse the truth until I thought I at least came close to what he wanted to hear. But are you supposed to be competitive in grad school? Hell – I wasn’t sure. So I went with the truth.

“I guess I am. I like to do well, and I’m motivated to try harder when surrounded with successful people.” I replied, and relaxed when I saw him smile. He explained that he liked people who wanted to be the best – they tended to work harder, delve deeper into research, and explore various opportunities more carefully.

The problem came when I stopped wanting to try harder, but retained the competitive drive. When that happens, you’re left only with hoping, sometimes desperately, that everyone else drops the ball – misses that question you failed to study for, decides to take a long weekend because you really need the break too, needs 3 hours to write a lab you wrote in 2 so you can get a little more sleep. If you don't want to do better yourself, the only way to get ahead is to have other people do worse.

I hated to hear that people studied all weekend. Because I rarely did – I like to shop, love to read, and wanted to make time for dating and friends. But I’d feel guilty and inferior for not putting in the time, so I’d volunteer that I hadn’t needed to spend the whole weekend studying (so you think I’m losing now, but I’m not) because I had more copies of old exams making myself more efficient. Ah, 2 strategies, so it’s critical to decide which is more effective so you can declare a winner.

I won some – not as many as I would have liked. But I’m concerned with the fact that winning was often more important to me than learning. I crammed for tests, memorizing, using mnemonic devices to shove information into my short term memory. When you have 3 midterms in a week, taking an hour to understand a concept just wasn’t feasible to me. Some students did that – worked constantly, did extra reading, worked more practice problems to obtain this overall understanding of our specialized field. I saw them do badly on tests, and decided that my memorize-critical-information method was more effective.

It depends on your overall goal, right? Instant or delayed gratification? It's determined by your personality, maybe on how competitive you are and where you see the major battles for superiority, as to what is most important. I wanted the grade, and to be fair, I eventually got the concepts. When I was frantically memorizing my 50 pages of condensed notes for the qualifier, something clicked, and I saw how all the facts fit together to form some cohesive theories. So I got it, but almost inadvertently, stumbling over it as I was chasing a high test score.

People will tell you, myself included, that grades aren’t important in grad school. I believe that – very few people have asked to see my transcript (though one university did upon receiving my CV, and fellowship applications require a listing of grades). Also, professors were generally kind in my department. If you attended class, attempted the homework, turned in lab reports that were appropriate, and demonstrated that you understood something on the exams, you generally came out OK in the end. I also don't at all advocate my self-inflicted torture of wanting to do better than students who I now see were incredibly talented and prepared.

The problem is that showing the distribution of scores to students who were likely always near the top in undergrad, students who really like to be a little bit better than everyone else, who derive confidence and self-esteem from doing well in school, creates an environment where people at the top fight to stay there and people at the bottom will eventually grow desperate to claw their way up.

I occasionally hear about people who burn out and leave the field – unable to handle the constant rejection on papers and grants, unwilling to subject themselves to the endless competition to be invited to speak at conferences, to obtain federal and private funding for research, to get tenure, to actually become a professor. It’s not particularly easy to get into graduate programs, especially those that are particularly well known and ranked. But it’s even harder to get that faculty positions after grad school. And for competitive people, it grates that you have to lose so often.

So you’re faced with deciding whether you want to go play another game – one where you’re smart and educated and hard-working instead of average in the academic world. Or are you going to look up at the people who are truly successful, and plot your strategy to get there, knowing you’ll face failures along the way and that the outcome, sometimes regardless of your talent and determination, is not at all guaranteed? I’m still deciding. And for the record, I think it takes strength to get out and pursue something that might make you happier. I also respect those who stay in and try to make things better for future students. I just don't know where I'm going to fall.

I also read, as I was trying to complete my degree, about scientific misconduct. Professors had faked data, and manipulated studies to obtain grants. Someone substituted results using one disease strain for another to get a good-sized federal grant. And while I find the idea repulsive, there’s a part of me that gets it. When you’re winning – getting money and publications – you want to keep winning. And when you’re losing, you have to do something, anything, to change your situation. I can imagine how that feels. I was never at the point where I felt I was losing (or on the verge of losing) so badly that I considered cheating or lying to try to do better. But if I try to put myself in their shoes, I appreciate the desperation that this field can bring.

I think that professor in Chicago had the right idea though. Are you competitive, and if so, can you understand what that means to your education and employment? If you’re incredibly motivated by the performance of those around you, perhaps you should remind yourself that honor and integrity always trump victory. The worst year of my life was my first one in grad school, spent constantly keeping track of how I was doing in direct comparison with other people and berating myself when I came up short. I was finally able to dial it back, perhaps because the energy to maintain that level of competition was too demanding, and am happier for it.

But as I start to resent people who appear to be making more progress more quickly than I am, I’m reminded that I am competitive, and being conscious of that is sometimes necessary to bring focus completely to myself - my goals, my abilities and steps I need to take. I'm still not thrilled that someone who started a post-doc 2 months after me is in the middle of a study while I'm still trying to start mine, but I'm not also not willing to cut any corners to move faster. So far so good.