Academic success

In the world we live in today, education is a vital part of succeeding, but is having an academically competitive atmosphere a help to us the student or will it hinder our studies? The reason one becomes a student and further ones education is to live a happy and successful life. But, does the key to academical success reside in a competitive atmosphere?

Being in a competitive atmosphere does not mean that a student will push his/ herself to their limits and try to surpass themselves or everyone else. A competitive atmosphere is a fuel of sorts to motivate the student and that’s about it, it does not help in anyway at all in most cases they can destroy a student. In order for us to succeed, we need to be in an environment that we are able to cope with. A competitive atmosphere will only lead us to think “In order to succeed I need to compete”. But that thought is totally inaccurate, do not forget that students are human beings and we have feelings and emotions just like everyone else, and a competitive atmosphere will only lead to stress and doubts in our mind, we will be more concern about competition between our peers rather than concentrating and doing our best in our studies and scholastic activities. Placing us in an environment suitable to our personality will lead to better results. School is just like the workplace, if an employee does not feel content with his work environment his work will be less effective than if he were in an environment suitable to him, in this case both the employee and the company loses, the employee loses since he is not happy, as for the company it loses its production because the employee is not working to his full potential. The academic environment is the exact same thing, if we the student are not happy with our surroundings we will not be able to work. Why not? Because once us, the student is not happy or cannot cope with our surroundings, we will go into a depression phase which will lead to rejection at everything we do and straight to failure and just like the company, our society and economy will not be able to flourish due to the failure of students. With the pressure that is being put on us nowadays: exams, social status, trying to fit in etc. Do you honestly think that having an academically competitive atmosphere will help us, the students? No, not at all it will only add insult to injury.

By definition, happiness is an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction. Thus, we the student cannot work to our full potential if we are not in the state of happiness or content with our surroundings (peers, environment etc.) even if we have an academically competitive atmosphere it will more likely hinder us than help us due to the lack of satisfaction to the student.