Freshman year. As she walks through the Jefferson dome for the first time, Rhea Vidyababu’s eyes are wide open at the prospects of intellectual collaboration that surely lie ahead. It’s not until her IBET group begins comparing their scores on the recent biology test that her focus shifts from expanding knowledge to beating her friend’s 96%.
Sophomore year. Vidyabubu spends this year exploring her interests in a variety of clubs, including yearbook and Urban Dance Movement. But once she hears word that the girl in her math class founded a nonprofit and the boy who sits next to her in chemistry created a club, she begins to question herself: shouldn’t I do something like that—wouldn’t it look good? Doing these things must make me an accomplished person; it would feel nice, right?
Junior year. With college apps on the horizon, Vidyababu endeavors to secure a summer internship position. Even as she slogs through hours of physics homework, she still tries to convince herself that the horror stories the upperclassmen told her last year are just a fantasy. Now, she’s a swim team manager and interning outside of school: but it’s not like I’m the president of Science Olympiad. Am I standing out enough?
Senior year. College apps: the supposed culmination of all her late nights studying, contests for leadership positions, and efforts to stand out. Did the four years of competition motivate me to get to this point, or was it more draining than it was worth?
Vidyababu’s experience reflects that of too many students at Jefferson. An environment of high-achieving students naturally gives rise to a competitive environment—there exists a constant pressure to not only do well but also to outshine others
From a practical point of view, healthy competition can enrich educational performance. A 2002 Columbia study suggested that educational outcomes improve with higher levels of competition in secondary education; however, there are too few cases statistically significant to signify an explicit relationship (around a 1% difference in improvement). Meanwhile, a 2013 study done by the University of Pitesti provides more nuance—while students with a “well-formed personality” performed better under competitive circumstances, others showed better results in a cooperative one. However, competition taken to the extreme proved to have detrimental socio-emotional effects, including decreased self-esteem and antipathy between students.
A Washington Post article summarizes studies from the Journal of Youth and Adolescence and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that conclude students in high-achieving schools are more prone to suffering from mental health issues, including depression and anxiety. Due to the constant pressure of competition from their surrounding environment, 75% of high school students reported feeling “often or always stressed.” In many students, this stress develops into a fear of failure and a dependency on achievement.
It’s not just numbers that report pressured environments due to competition; students and teachers worry about it within the school body as well.
Every year, freshmen struggle with the robot competition. As someone who is fond of healthy competition, lab technology teacher Jared Seyler believes misinterpretations of the project alter students’ perception of failure.
“People got upset over the fact that it was a competition,” Seyler said. “At [Jefferson], it seems like you have to be the best, or you failed, like polar opposites. It’s not, ‘I can be pretty good and still learn how to get better,’—that doesn’t seem to be why we’re competing here.”
Seyler saw a trend of students’ dissatisfaction with their performance and the excess negativity that comes with a competitive mindset.
“No matter how many times you showed them that their grade would be fine, and even at the end of the robot competition, when they looked at their grade, and it was fine, they still saw that as utter failure—even though it’s a very difficult task and it’s basically summing up the entire class,” Seyler said. “So it often became very negative when it was never meant to be a negative thing.”
Senior Charles Dabini Muldoon has spoken out about his concerns and beliefs about the competitive culture inside Jefferson. He believes that the student enterprising at Jefferson sways towards “toxicity,” saying that many student achievements double as a detriment to another student’s self-merit.
“[I think that] competitions are generally good. Because oftentimes, when you’re competing with someone, you both push each other to be better, right? It’s almost collaborative,” Muldoon said. “But it’s different at Jefferson because people are willing to do anything to pull ahead. You eventually come to the belief that somebody else’s success is equivalent to your failure. And that’s not good. Your initial reaction is not ‘Oh, I’m proud of my friend for achieving such a task or award.’ You think, ‘Oh, I didn’t get that. Shoot.’’”
Within the community, students may even be unconsciously affected by a competitive mindset. Even while not actively contributing to competitiveness, Muldoon finds that it’s easy to slip into an every-man-for-himself attitude that gives way to feelings of envy and subsequent inadequacy.
“I found out that one of my friends won something in a [computer science] competition. I don’t even care about CS, but I still felt like ‘Oh, he has that now to put on his resume.’ And, even though I try to avoid caring so much about my resume—I tried to select clubs that I actually enjoy—that still was in my mind,” Muldoon said.
Meanwhile, senior and Student Government Association secretary Jordan Lee has experienced much of the positives of competitiveness, especially within the student government community.
“I just see a lot of people doing a lot of hard work for us [in SGA] and it inspires me to step up my game and put in more effort as well. It is a healthy kind of pressure,” Lee said, though still acknowledging the possible negative mindsets stemming from competition and believes most of it comes from one’s self-security.
“For example, [grades are] one big factor of comparison between TJ students,” Lee said. “If you base your value off of where you stand with other people, then that’s when it becomes unhealthy. Let’s say you got a B on the test and your friend gets an A and you place your value in that. It’s not gonna resonate well with you; you’re gonna feel jealousy or bitterness or you might beat yourself up because you weren’t able to get the A. So really it comes down to security and yourself.”
With the pressure to excel, students may lean towards activities that will “pad” their resumes. This summer saw a rise in student-created non-profits.
“I see so many people sharing nonprofits, and I’m just sitting here in my bedroom playing video games. [My initial feeling] was like, ‘Man, like what am I doing’,” Lee said.
Muldoon, who believed the uptick in nonprofit creation to be of questionable intent, authored a post in a public Facebook group for all Jefferson students stating these concerns.
“There’s been a lot of questionable nonprofits made around helping minority groups. Usually, [the creators will] have one post to notify people over making this group…and then, there will be nothing from them after that,” Muldoon said. “It’s not even that people are doing this, but it’s the fact that freshmen and underclassmen are led to believe that it’s okay to do this—it’s acceptable to use other groups to boost yourself. And that’s the mindset you kind of build at Jefferson; you have to do whatever to get ahead.”
Especially in light of the pandemic in March, a variety of nonprofits popped up, many offering tutoring and supportive community services. Muldoon sees these organizations as facades for self-gain; they usually disintegrate after it becomes inessential for the creators’ resume entries. This may discredit the effort of volunteers like sophomore Sanjana Anand, who spends at least 20 hours a week working with the Northern Virginia chapter of Days for Girls, which she has done for the past five years.
“I feel like everyone is just trying to make nonprofits for college applications and not because they’re actually wanting to do good for the community or benefit anyone,” Anand said. “I have had at least five nonprofits where friends are just [direct-messaging] me to support their nonprofit which they’re doing nothing for; they’re not influencing anyone by doing it.”
Although this culture at Jefferson leads students to assume that most non-profits are created with a competitive intent, this is not necessarily the case. Ananya Yarlagadda, a sophomore who co-founded the online tutoring nonprofit called Illumination Tutoring, believes that many of her peers genuinely would like to help the community – and quarantine gave them the time to do it.
“There’s so many things that can be done, and I think [quarantine] gave a lot of students time to reflect and think about how they can give back to the community because starting a nonprofit is a lot of hard work especially in our school, we don’t have time to put in that effort,” Yarlagadda said. “So I think the amount of time that we were given, and also the brand new field that was literally presented to us [are] the reasons why there’s been a spike in nonprofits.”
Lee believes that although they may contribute to the pressure to succeed, nonprofits aren’t all created with competitive attitudes, especially if students are genuinely interested in their respective activities.
“Base things on what you’re passionate about; I would not run for an officer position of a club that’s not something I’m really passionate about just for the sake of trying to get higher status,” Lee said. “At the end of the day, you should always just pursue things that you’re intrinsically just motivated to do and physically passionate about. That’s that’s what really matters.”
(Courtesy of Challenge Success)
Jefferson’s Challenge Success team aims to tackle the toxicity that competitiveness can bring in all aspects of Jefferson’s culture, including academics and extracurriculars, through addressing the faculty’s role in encouraging individual definitions of success. Malcolm Eckel, staff representative for Challenge Success, believes that although competition is inevitable, it can help students succeed individually and have fun through changing course structures.
“There is this vision of success, where you get all the best grades by grinding through all the hardest classes, and then go to college and then do it again, and then get a job, make a lot of money and then maybe you get to be ‘successful’ at the end. What we want is for students to find [their own] definition of success,” Eckel said. “And that means changing the way that we approach courses, because I think that the way courses are designed encourages that one dimensional definition of success. If everybody has all the same assignments and all the same tests they’re just competing for points. Then, all that competitive energy gets spent on being 0.5% better than your peer at exactly the same things as opposed to being unique.”
In his own computer science classes, Eckel has implemented a course structure that allows students to choose their own assignments to pursue for 20% of their grade. Along with this, he believes that providing straightforward grading and chances to resubmit assignments have allowed students to pursue their own “paths to success” instead of being constrained.
“Challenge Success advocates for assignments where the grading is less picayune and the flexibility is much wider. You want to create chances for students to really stand out from each other by being different, not by being slightly better at exactly the same thing,” Eckel said. “And so the competition in the class sort of disappears in terms of trying to get the better scores, because there are no scores to compare. Instead, what happens is students find the assignments that they are that they are most interested in and do those.”
Competitive culture—a simultaneously productive and damaging phenomenon—seems unavoidable. But the presence of competition itself may not be the issue; rather, students’ collective attitudes towards competition leads towards that vicious cycle of negativity.
“I personally think competition is good, but it’s on the person competing to understand that it’s okay to not win,” Seyler says. “I think you’re gonna get [competition] no matter what; that’s just nature.”
Amidst this competition, an individual shift in motivations from external to internal may transform personal pressure into a more positive phenomenon.
“I would say you should value more [intrinsic] traits like hard work, because at the end of the day that’s what’s going to help you. In the long term and life, grades are a very temporary thing. That’s usually just a high school struggle, but hard work that’s gonna stick with you to your long term career after school right,” Lee said. “[It’s important to] change your mindset and what you’re trying to chase for.”
History and Philosophy teacher Brian Field opens up the question of competition to a broader context, prompting students to consider a more nuanced perspective.
“There seems to be a negative connotation with [competition]. And I don’t think that we should be assigning negative or positive,” Field said. “I actually don’t think competition is the issue; it is how people are feeling around the idea of competition. So I don’t think that we’re thinking about this deep enough.”
How do we create some sort of unified community, unified sort of goal, advancing in a direction?”” — Brian Field
If competition can supplement productivity, the goal should not be to completely cut it out. Instead, the shift should be towards thinking about it in a healthy way, and limiting its impacts on student relationships.
“Focusing on competition is difficult and I don’t think you need a school wide effort on competition; I don’t think the student demographics would necessarily support it. [Students] naturally like competition.They see [Jefferson] as a competitive type of school,” Field said. “So, we need to focus on building relationships, which doesn’t necessarily mean talking about competition. How do we create some sort of unified community, unified sort of goal, advancing in a direction?”
Since her first walk through the dome three years ago, Vidyababu’s approach to competition at Jefferson has been further shaped through her experiences.
“Back in freshman year, Ms. [Patricia] Lister was telling us about how we should have a growth mindset versus a ‘TJ mindset’ and that’s when I realized that ‘hey, comparing yourself to other people doesn’t get anything done,” Vidyababu said. “Once you have a growth mindset, you just start competing with yourself and you’re like ‘I just want to do better each time.’; it gives you motivation and a drive to work hard.”
