I cried yesterday. I was sobbing: red, wet, puffy, and gross because of the academic competition I face in school every day. I don’t mean to do it, compare myself to other students, but it’s inevitable…

The main point of a competition is to see who is better in a certain arena. Equality is emphasizing and enforcing the importance of all of us as equals, and competition is the exact opposite. It darkens the line even more between best and worst…

No one likes it, / The thing most fear, / Unpredictable, / We work hard to run away, / Hidden lessons weaved in, / Forced, / People get emotional / Some don’t even care, / Reminds us how much / We like winning…

I came home, excited after a day full of learning, to find my mother waiting for me at the door with some great news: my name had been picked from the lottery to go to the first math meet of the year! Restlessly, I awaited the day.

Competition surrounds my life. In almost everything I do there is some sort of a competition involved even when there does not have to be. The teachers don’t always have control over how their students create competitions…

Competition is a big part of the everyday world. It overlaps with the desire for power and the desire for community, bringing people together at the same time it could be tearing them apart.

I used to wrestle… One time, after losing a match, I sat back down on the bench, changing my shoes and getting a drink of water. I heard a parent yelling at their son for losing his last match. They never told him what to do better, they just yelled…

There was a girl named Kesha. She was 13 years old, and she was exceptionally good at running. She had a brother who was 7 and a little sister who was 23 months. Her mom was a single mom because her dad was in jail.

What does it mean to win or lose? How can we use competition to grow as individuals? In response to these queries, I thought about three of my past experiences: Suzuki violin training, The Agents of Social Change (TASC) incident, and my SSAT experience.

I used to despise competition. Growing up with siblings, our lives were devoted to one-upping each other and proving who had done something better than the other. I often found myself doing crazy things solely for the purpose of proving…

As my dirty, sweaty palm makes contact with my opponent’s, I look him in the eye. He was their striker and my assignment to shut down for the game. I put everything I had into making sure he did not get in on goal, complete a pass, have any room to breathe.

Since tenth grade, I have participated in a competition called Ethics Bowl. Every year high school students gather in teams in New York City to talk about ethical dilemmas and give their opinions on how these dilemmas should be resolved.