Growing up, I played a lot of different sports (soccer, basketball, track, tennis, lacrosse, dance, you name it) and enjoyed playing videogames and card games with my older siblings, cousins, and friends. One of my favorite things about playing all these different games was the competitive nature of them and knowing that I could piss someone off simply by being my amazing self 😂 (full disclosure: this piece has some narrator bias in it, if that last sentence didn’t give it away already)

Often when my brother and I played against each other in Halo, soccer, or basketball, we would eventually end up in a fist fight and one of us (…usually me) would end up crying. It was fun to compete with each other and try to show him how much better I am than him. Which I definitely am. Even if he’d win the fist fight, it was only because he was mad that I was better than him at sports or videogames. He won’t ever read this, so he can’t argue against this. Anyway…

For more serious things, like work and school, I don’t like to be competitive at all. I truly believe that we are only as good as the people around us, and that’s (part of) why we should work to lift each other up and make each other better. If you are surrounded by great, kind, intelligent, hard working people, I think that’s a pretty good sign that you might be great, kind, intelligent, and hard working too. We should celebrate each other’s accomplishments, because, if you are truly a team, then their accomplishments are also yours. A quote I often think of is: “Other people’s successes are not your failures.”

For less serious things, like soccer, Mario Kart, or card games, my competitive side comes out a little bit more. It’s fun to talk trash. And it’s fun because at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a silly game. So you get to yell and be snarky, but you know that it’s only temporary. When it comes to your job or school…that’s your life. It’s important and it matters.

I think the thing that I get most frustrated with in grad school is how some people insist on making it competitive. Grad school is hard work! Sometimes you have to work really long days or come in on the weekends, you have to study for exams (I’m 25!! I feel too old to be studying for exams and doing homework!!), you have to read a lot of papers to stay current in the field, you constantly doubt yourself and wonder if you’re doing enough, you feel like other people are moving forward in their lives (getting married, starting families, getting promotions and a real salary with retirement benefits) while you’re just standing still. You try to balance your work and your life and sometimes that feels impossible. You don’t get paid that much…the list really goes on. But, even with all of that, I still find the competitiveness to be the most stressful, frustrating, and…honestly, annoying, thing about grad school.

I think a lot of the competitiveness in graduate school comes from the nature of an academic setting – for many graduate students, we have spent our lives working to get the highest grades, prestigious scholarships, whatever accolades to help get us to our next step. And all of that does have a competitive piece to it. It’s impossible to avoid. But that doesn’t mean we have to continue to nourish that competitiveness as we move into our own projects, our own research, and, eventually, our own careers. 

I feel incredibly lucky  to have such an incredible and supportive lab group – I say this all the time because it is true!! Both my labmate and I do research on gestational diabetes, though our projects are still very different. However, to their core, there is some similarity. We could compete with each other and try to know more about gestational diabetes than the other, tell the other person they can learn the protocol on their own…whatever other crazy stuff you can think of…but luckily neither of us want to compete with the other. Whenever one of us finds an interesting paper relating to our projects, we share it with the other. We talk and brainstorm about our projects together over lunch. We teach each other different techniques and protocols that we’ve learned that will be useful for them to learn as well. We listen to each other when the going gets tough. We see each other as teammates rather than competitors. And that’s exactly what we are – teammates.

I loved playing competitive sports growing up. And I still do! But the best part about playing competitive sports (or board games) is the friendships you develop along the way. Supporting each other, helping each other develop into better players, goofing off, team dinners, watching Magic Mike together in your goalie’s basement (shoutout to my high school soccer girlies), you name it. I wish we could remember that when thinking about the unfortunate reality of competitiveness in our lives and our careers. We don’t need to focus on beating each other…we can be teammates instead 😊

I always try to end these with some positivity because honestly, things are hard, but it’s mostly good. Sometimes you just need to complain. And the hard things can weigh on you a lot. So it’s good to talk about them and it’s good (…well, maybe not good, but validating?) to know that other people have experienced the same things. Grad school is hard. But I think it’s worth it. The good far outweighs the bad. The vast majority of people are there to support you, encourage you, and genuinely root for your success. I only need one hand to count the number of people who have made things feel competitive when they didn’t need to be. I feel really lucky that my lab has a very supportive culture and that I’ve found friends who genuinely want to see each other succeed. I told my therapist a couple of weeks ago (during my NEW biggest experiment of grad school yet), “I feel like I’m in the trenches, but at least I know I’m supported and won’t be stuck for long.” My only wish is that everyone can have as great of a support team as I do. I am so grateful and I will tell them every chance I get!!!!!!

Don’t let the haters bring you down, I’ll hype you up anytime 😤😘