My best friend Jeff Miller won a Rhodes Scholarship two weeks ago to study Milton at Oxford. While I would love nothing more than to use these 700 words to write about how well-deserved this accolade is, I feel I would be remiss if I did not write something about our peers' reactions to Jeff's success. At a school whose student body is such a driven and focused group of people, it has been interesting to watch how friends and acquaintances of Jeff's have handled his accomplishment these past few weeks. In addition to Jeff, I have other friends who have secured impressive jobs at Goldman Sachs, been accepted to Harvard Law and in general seem to be continuing where they left off when high school finished. What about the rest of us who have yet to secure a future post-graduation? How are we supposed to react when we seem to be struggling to find a foothold after college? While most reactions I have seen about Jeff's scholarship have been ones of praise and happiness, there have of course been those of bitterness and incredulity. While Jeff's closest friends have tended to be angry with some of these less than enthusiastic responses, I have to ask whether, as Princeton students, we are all inherently destined to be envious of others' success; after all, haven't we always been those kids winning the awards?
Princeton students are some of the most intelligent, gifted and diverse in the country. We have been trained and built to strive for absolute perfection whether in the classroom, on the athletic field or in the lab. From middle school through high school, as students and as people we were tailored to reach for the unattainable and be the best in the business. We spent our years in high school trying to shine above everyone else and earn our acceptance to a school like Princeton, and what's more, we all did it. We left high school thinking that we had reached the pinnacle of what we were capable of and had gotten into a school we had once thought unachievable. College, and more specifically Princeton, changed the stakes entirely; the bar was raised that much higher.
What this experience has taught me is that, as Princeton students, we will always have a friend or a peer who will go out and win that campaign, build that new microchip, create that new formula, win that award. Yes, this may sting our competitive pride. This may touch that darkest, most covered pit of competitive envy that invariably rests in all of our stomachs, and provided we are happy for their successes, this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, we are by nature competitive people — this has simply been the character of our schooling. If we do find ourselves being envious of others' successes, we should not shy away from this, but harness it as motivation. What our peers' accomplishments should do is drive us to do something even greater — this should be one of the most unique facets of the Princeton experience.
At an institution like Princeton, it is very easy to become complacent; it is easy to convince ourselves that we have already achieved success just by being granted admission. It is so comfortable to rest contently on our laurels and let our future degree validate our accomplishment. In doing so, however, we invariably lose some of our competitive fire and passion for perfection. For me, it took something like this to shake me out of the soothing lull of the Princeton bubble; it took my best friend's winning a Rhodes Scholarship for me to realize that life will continue after college and that I too can do something incredible with this education I have been lucky to have had these last four years. Finding a job is really hard, even with a Princeton degree, but I have no doubt that I will find one. Succeeding after Princeton with equal success will be even harder, but as I see my friends doing just that, I am confident that I to can rise to the challenge. As Milton himself wrote, "Awake, arise or be for ever fallen." Chris Berger is a history major from New York City. He can be reached at cberger@princeton.edu.
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