“What are you doing this summer?” “Where are you interning?” “What was your GPA?” “Where are you applying to law school?” “Did you get the position?” “What are you doing after graduation?”
At Yeshiva University, these questions are completely normal and mostly come from a genuine place. We are curious about what our friends are doing and want to celebrate their achievements. However, I sometimes wonder if there is something else motivating these questions.
Sometimes, we are not asking because we simply want to know where someone is interning; rather, we are asking to know how their internship compares to ours. We are not asking where someone is applying to law school, medical school or graduate school only because we are interested. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we are also wondering: Where am I compared to them?
And I believe YU has a comparison problem.
There always seems to be some invisible competition happening. Who got the better internship? Who got elected president of the club? Who has the higher GPA? Who got the job? Who is going to the better graduate program?
And somehow, without anybody officially declaring a competition, we all start competing.
What makes this especially strange to me is that we attend a university that constantly teaches us about middot, values, faith and becoming better people. We learn that there is more to life than accomplishments and titles. We are taught to trust Hashem and believe that what is meant for us will ultimately find us. Yet, it can become incredibly difficult to actually live that way when we are constantly looking around at what everyone else is doing.
Someone gets an internship, and instead of simply being happy for them, we immediately think about ours. Someone announces that they got into a program, and suddenly we question whether we are doing enough. Someone gets a leadership position we wanted, and suddenly their accomplishment feels like our failure.
But their success does not take anything away from ours, which is what we tend to forget.
Someone else getting an incredible internship does not mean that you are behind. Someone having a higher GPA does not make you less intelligent. Someone getting into law school, medical school or graduate school before you does not mean that you will not get where you are supposed to go. Someone being successful at 21 does not mean you have failed if you are still figuring things out at 22.
We are all living completely different lives.
We have different families, responsibilities, opportunities, struggles, talents and goals. Some students can spend an entire summer doing an unpaid internship; others need to work because they have bills to pay. Some people know exactly what they want to do after graduation; others are still trying to figure it out. Neither person’s path is automatically better.
That is why comparison is so dangerous. We compare the part of someone else’s life that we can see with the entirety of our own life that we know.
And usually, we lose.
I am not writing this as someone who never compares herself to other people. I do it too. I think most of us do. It is hard not to when we are surrounded by ambitious students who are constantly accomplishing impressive things.
But maybe that is exactly why we need to talk about it.
Ambition is not a bad thing. Wanting the internship, the leadership position, the good grade or the acceptance letter is not a bad thing either. We should work hard. We should have goals. We should push ourselves.
The problem begins when our motivation stops being “I want to become better” and becomes “I want to be better than them.”
Those are two completely different things.
If we really believe in the values we talk about so often, then there should be room for someone else’s success alongside our own. We should be able to hear good news from a friend without immediately turning it into a measurement of our own lives.
And if we really believe that Hashem has a plan for each of us, then maybe we should actually trust that plan even when someone else’s life seems to be moving faster than ours.
Maybe the internship you did not get was never supposed to be yours. Maybe the position that went to somebody else will lead you toward something better suited for you. Maybe your timeline looks completely different from your friend’s because it is supposed to.
That does not mean we stop working hard and simply wait for things to happen. We still have to put in the effort. We still apply. We still study. We still work toward our goals.
But we can work hard without constantly looking sideways.
Because there will always be someone with something we do not have. A better grade. A bigger internship. A more impressive title. A graduate school acceptance. A job offer.
If our happiness depends on being ahead of everyone around us, we will never actually feel ahead.
So maybe the next time someone tells us about something amazing happening in their life, instead of immediately asking ourselves what it means about our own life, we can just be happy for them.
Their path is theirs.
Ours is ours.
And maybe the greatest competition at YU should not be about who has the best résumé, the highest GPA or the most impressive plans after graduation.
Maybe the only person we really need to compete with is the person we were yesterday.