Walking home after class with one of my printed articles in hand, I sat down with a group of friends. I had just gotten a summer internship in New York City and told them about it, feeling quite accomplished with myself. A few minutes later, someone joked that I didn’t have a “real major” and that COLA wasn’t a good school to be in.
At a “work hard, play hard” school like UT, competitiveness is almost second nature to most students.
We say, “What starts here changes the world.” So, naturally, everyone wants to be the best.
“It’s expected when coming to a school like UT,” advertising sophomore Melissa Huy said.
Most of the time, this friendly competition is a good thing. Seeing your peers go above and beyond, applying to internships, joining campus organizations and working hard encourages you to do the same. It can be an incredibly motivational environment.
Although UT is competitive, Huy said she finds the frequent conversations about internships beneficial because she learns more about how people got them, which encourages her to take action and keep working hard.
Then there’s the other side of it. We’ve all heard people make fun of schools like the College of Liberal Arts, Moody and the College of Fine Arts. We’ve all heard people call economics majors “McCombs rejects.” We’ve all heard people talk down on other schools, disciplines and majors. Social psychologists call this phenomenon downward comparison.
“If I’m feeling insecure about something in my life, that’s a symptom of (another situation),” psychology professor Art Markman said. “I might say a nasty thing about somebody else or look down on them.”
This leads our healthy competition to become toxic rather than motivational.
“When we engage in that downward social comparison, what we’re doing is trying to make ourselves feel good about something,” Markman said.
It’s not that certain disciplines are “better” than others. This occurrence is just a negative side effect of competitive schools like UT. People look out at the world and try to make themselves feel better by finding a reason why they believe someone else is worse off than they are.
What may seem like a superiority complex is really an internal inferiority complex. Feelings of inadequacy lead people to open fire on others, judge others and put them down.
“People do it out of their own insecurities,” Markman said. “They make these jokes to cover for that or find a dimension on which they think they’re superior and make the comment because it helps to reinforce their own self-esteem.”
Still, competition at this school is usually a motivational factor that pushes students to do more, and it must be noted that jokes are always going to be made between friends. UT doesn’t need less ambition. It just needs less insecurity-driven competition and more respect for different paths.
“Someone else’s successes aren’t your failures,” Huy said.
Calling majors and disciplines “easy” or not as important isn’t harmless. It creates a hierarchy that doesn’t exist.
Success at UT often seems to have a very narrow definition of McCombs, pre-med or engineering, but not everything has to be ranked. Many life paths lead to success and happiness, and above all, are also important.
“I think everyone just needs to be kinder and make it a motivating space rather than (leading to) feelings of insecurity,” Huy said.
Competition is a good thing, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of how we treat each other. At a school built on ambition, tearing each other down shouldn’t be the way to prove that you belong.
Thakkar is a government and economics sophomore from Winter Park, Florida.
