Competing

From a very young age, we are subject to comparison by adults.

• Jimmy was really heavy when he was born.
• Jane started walking when she was 6 months old! That’s really fast!
• Johnny was reading at an 8th grade level when he was four years old!

As we get older we compare ourselves with our peers, “I’m better than he is at handstands.”; “Pound-for-pound Joe is the strongest in the class, but Jeff is absolutely stronger than everyone else.” and so forth. And as time goes on, we’re always sizing up ourselves to our perceived opponents. It’s second nature. Eventually, we settle and accept our rank in society. We know we can’t play basketball professionally. We know that Jenn will always kick our butts at foozball.

We also accept / know our specialties as well and within our specialization we know where we stand.

I wonder if doing a difference comparison is (a) just a natural thing, (b) something that we’re conditioned to do, or (c) if I’ve been the only crazy one constantly comparing one thing to another. I can’t be the crazy one; I see this happening everywhere and with practically everyone.

As an armchair anthropologist, I wonder if that’s just how we evolved. Meaning, I wonder if making comparisons and identifying degrees of dangers / threats is a survival trait that has been passed down. And now it’s so natural that we just automatically do it and think that it’s foreign to not compare.

We Compare Everything

We don’t just compare ourselves to others. We say things like, “it’s really cold out today.” which is an implicit comparison to other days. Even a simple statement like “The light is on.” is a comparison against its other state of “off”. There are few things that we say in an absolute sense.

Now some of this is, of course, a necessity. We’re finite beings. We can’t do everything at once (though some may argue that they are great multi-taskers). I have to prioritize writing this article over, say, staring out the window. This is fine in my books. Books. Perfect segue.

Off to College!

I remember when I started college. I was ready for the challenge! College is where I had wanted to be since I was twelve. College was always sold to me as a wonderful place for learning and the first passage into adulthood. As a place of learning it was sold like

• You could major in whatever you wanted!
• You could take whatever courses you want in whatever order.
• You wouldn’t have a bed time or a curfew.
• You wouldn’t even have to go to class if you don’t want to.
• You could “start all over again” and leave high school and its angst behind.
• You’d be free to learn as much or as little as you want.

As a rite of passage into adulthood it was sold like

• You had to go to college if you wanted to get ahead in life.
• The real world was a dog-eat-dog world and college was going to get you ready for it.
• College wouldn’t be like high school. The professors wouldn’t care and colleges would just see you as a number. Get over your sense of self-worth.
• You had to make a name for yourself.
• You had to get an internship every summer.
• You had to make it on the Dean’s list if you wanted to get research opportunities.
• You had to be the person who “ruined the curve”.
• You had to survive the “weed out” courses.
• You had to look out for yourself.

I kept all of these things in mind as I started my first semester. Who were the “smart” kids? Who were the partiers? Which professors would destroy you? What’s the best schedule to have to maximize fun time and study time? Those questions turned into micro questions.

• What’s the exam going to be on?
• How much can I cram?
• Did the professor say that there would be extra credit?
• How much is this assignment worth?
• What’s the class average?
• Why did I lose 2 points here?

I thought that I was simultaneously focusing on learning and keeping the “real world monster” tame, but it was nothing of the sort. In truth, I had stopped focusing on learning the course content and started focusing on the “rite of passage”. Somewhere in the first two weeks that place of learning that college was supposed to be, became a race for points.

I think I just naturally raced for points. They were there to be gotten. The more points I could get, the better my chances at survival in the real world. Other students did the same and so there was a positive feedback loop reaffirming our behavior.

The Physics Professor

At about that two or three week mark, I was at a Physics professor’s office hours. I wasn’t really there to ask questions about velocity and gravity. I was there to see what I had to do to get an A. The physics professor got annoyed. And in typical grumpy, gray-beard, silver-haired, lanky professor style he said, “Ahh, no one cares about your grade. No one will care. Just learn.”. And then my head exploded.

What? What do you mean no one cares about my grade? How am I going to get a job with a poor GPA? How will I get into graduate school? How will I survive real life?

He was, quite possibly, the first person to say, so bluntly, something completely opposite from the rite-of-passage message I’d been fed. He was also a professor. I took his words about academics seriously, but I didn’t know how to reconcile them. Was he right?

I floated the idea to friends and other professors. My friends disagreed with the professor. The other professors didn’t exactly agree, but didn’t disagree either. The other professors gave what I felt were vague, non-answers like, “If you study and learn the material, you’ll get an A.”.

So then I retreated into my mind. There was just too much external noise and I had to think this through. I don’t remember the exact thought process anymore. In fact, I’m not even sure I actually retreated into my mind. But I do remember my decision. I decided I didn’t want to compete on grades.

Not Competing On Grades

Not competing was surprisingly very difficult. As I stopped caring about grades, I stopped the point hunting. I went back to focusing on learning. My only carrot was “learning is good” and there were several sticks. Failing a course was definitely not a good idea. Not learning was equally a bad idea. There was also the social pressure stick — being classified as “dumb” because of my grades.

My first semester in college was a relative disaster as measured by my grade performance — Bs and Cs. But as measured by my satisfaction in terms of what I learned, it was a relative success. My grades suffered because I didn’t learn the material by the time I was to take exams. My learning didn’t suffer because I made sure to learn the material over the semester regardless. I tested myself. I did the problems from the textbook, I “retook” the exams on my own, and I was able to explain the material from earlier in the semester to classmates who had already forgotten it and were cramming for the next exam.

As the semesters went by, my Bs and Cs accumulated. There were few, if any, As on the transcript.

The Physics Professor Was Wrong

My grades did matter. I was turned down from research opportunities and I didn’t land any awesome internships that would propel me to corporate success. My applications were rejected almost immediately and I saw my friends get the opportunities I was passed up for. My friends certainly deserved them though. They knew their stuff and they had the grades to show it. I, on the other hand, had a two point something GPA and no way to demonstrate that I knew anything on an application that asked for a GPA.

Over the semesters, I began to understand that I would have to pave a very different path if I wanted to survive in the real world — I knew I would have to compete in the real world regardless; there was a steady drumbeat of “no one’s going to hire you if your grades, résumé yadda yadda …”. I applied to work as a Peer Learning Assistant within the Math and Electrical Engineering departments for the pay they offered, the résumé building opportunity, and because I had something to prove that my grades couldn’t. To get accepted for this position one had to demonstrate knowledge of the material and secure some support from faculty. I could do this! The faculty, I think, understood what type of student I was, regardless of the grade I earned in their courses. And as fate would have it, I got both positions.

I hadn’t really stopped competing, though I thought I had. I was still fighting the grades battle, but in a different way. I was fighting an asymmetric battle against grades. But I liked this asymmetry. It suited me just fine. The asymmetry afforded me the ability to learn how I wanted to learn. The cost was that a prime metric (grades) for real world survival suffered and I had to offset it somehow. I was offsetting the poor grades with some résumé building activities.

The Physics Professor Was Right

I got my first full-time job out of college, despite my grades. The company that hired me didn’t care about my grades. They cared more about other things like: can I work in a group, do I know my math (they asked me a bunch of math questions in the interview), that sort of thing. And the general stories from my bosses was that good grades make opening certain doors easier, but walking through still requires that you know your stuff and not getting kicked out requires that you be able to apply that knowledge and continue to learn. On the flip side, poor grades make opening certain doors very difficult, if not impossible. So ye be warned, there are consequences, whether we like them or not.

I worked for a few years and then wanted to go back to graduate school. And now I was once again fighting the grade monster that I had created. Graduate schools did look at GPA, subject GRE scores, letters of recommendation, and your application / statement of purpose. Though, I am unsure how the last two matter. My subject GRE scores were, from what I was told, ok. Nothing stellar. My undergrad GPA was going to be a problem. So when applying to graduate programs I had to be a bit more proactive. Phone calls, following up, a personal touch — all that sales-y stuff.

I got accepted to a few graduate programs and I eventually accepted the offer from Florida State University where I went on to get my MS and PhD in Mathematics. In graduate school, I went back to my old form started worrying about grades, but caught myself early on. I stopped fighting the grade monster and accepted it for what it was — a bureaucratic process for filtering. I just had to keep myself from not being filtered out either in the short term because of poor grades or in the long term because of “good” grades and poor learning.

Time-warping to today, the physics professor has been long-term correct. After some point, nobody cares about grades. And if at this stage in my life / career a potential employer cares about my GPA, then I’m disinterested in working at that organization. End time-warp.

The Real Competition

While I had stopped competing on grades in the traditional sense of point hunting, I was still competing. I was still trying to differentiate myself against others — that’s a competition of sorts. It seemed inescapable.

A few years into graduate school, I had a revelation. And here, I think the revelation was more a conscious understanding of something that I had understood a long time ago when my Physics professor said “Just learn.”. The revelation was that the only entity to compete against was myself. All the other competitions are just distractions. All the other competitions are ageless battles over resources or the equivalent. We have large-scale wars between nations. We have competition between businesses. We have competition between individuals for a job, a date, for the last toy on the shelf during Christmastime, etc. We are thrust into those competitions whether we like them or not and compete we will like it or not.

But the real competition is against ourselves. If we continue to take the time and effort necessary to improve ourselves, then those other competitions we have with other individuals will resolve automatically. (And to channel a little Sartre, if everyone did this, yes, we may be back to dog-eat-dog or perhaps we’ll have a far more equitable society.) Continuing to learn is an engine that will just sustain itself.

Over the last few years, I feel that I’ve reached some level of peace on this. By and large, I have stopped competing externally — meaning, I have mostly stopped measuring myself against others. I say “mostly” because I still look at others’ accomplishments. But I look at those accomplishments to remove any psychological barriers I may have placed on myself.

Time will decide if I have made a grand mistake in ignoring the system of competition or if I have taken an equivalent but less traveled path of competing primarily (only?) against myself.