Competition Shouldn’t Cost Us Our Friendships

Competition has already infiltrated the classrooms at Harvard. Now it's coming for our friendships.

I knew that Harvard would be difficult. But coming from public high school in South Dakota, I wasn’t prepared for such a fiercely competitive environment — and I don’t mean academically.

It’s one thing to fight for the best grade in the class, but Harvard students have allowed exceedingly high academic standards to transform our classmates into competitors, and it's starting to harm our social lives.

In this high-pressure environment, the simple act of hanging out is overshadowed by internship applications, LinkedIn notifications, and constant comparisons. The result is a social landscape where friendships become transactional and students lose sight of what makes college memorable. It’s hard, but we must dial down the competition, carve out device-free moments, and make room for human connection before these fleeting four years pass us by.

It goes without saying that competition is a natural part of many environments. And for our generation in particular, the game of comparison is nothing new. With 24/7 access to social media, we can’t help but constantly compare ourselves to our peers.

At Harvard, the problem is exacerbated, both by the cutthroat application process that admission requires and the competitive culture instilled in us from the first day of classes.

With a whopping 3 percent acceptance rate, Harvard students have to win the competition olympics before they even attend. Many students come from highly competitive high schools scenes — like elite private or magnet schools — that necessitate competitive mindsets. Students from other backgrounds must develop that same competitiveness internally in order to win the admissions game.

Predictably, this fierce ambition doesn’t just fizzle away with acceptance to the College. Harvard students are used to working hard to be the best; it's only natural that we want to keep it that way when we get here.

This spirit of rivalry pervades everything we do. Students compete over vanishingly few coveted internship spots, campus consulting club roles with precariously low acceptance rates, and speaking time in section. It’s all competition, and it all comes at the expense of our mental health and social lives.

It seems like I can no longer have a casual hangout with friends without someone typing away at another application in the background. — I’m tired of friendships playing out through hollow congratulatory comments under our recent LinkedIn updates instead of across the table at Annenberg.

To fix this problem, we need to be able to separate our social lives from our academic ones. Taking 30 minutes from your jam-packed day to sit with a friend in a device free setting won’t derail your future. But constantly obsessing over problem sets and everyone else’s summer plans will only push us further away from one another and make us miss out on what makes college special.

Rather than viewing classmates as rivals to be surpassed, we ought to think of how we arrived at Harvard in the first place — with the support of those around us. When we support — rather than compete against — our classmates, we contribute to a strong, united community aimed at mutual flourishing rather than individualized ambition.

Harvard will continue to be rigorous and competitive — but that doesn’t mean our friendships have to be.

Siyanne A. Redda, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.