A student on Reddit asked recently how people stop comparing themselves to classmates.
The setting was familiar. A competitive school. Friends with Olympiad medals, research, unusual jobs, and profiles that looked intimidating from the outside. The student was doing well by any normal standard, but inside that school environment, normal standards had almost disappeared.
I hear versions of this from Indian students too.
Someone in the grade has a published paper. Someone has a startup. Someone has done a summer program abroad. Someone has a national rank, a patent, a nonprofit, a research mentor, or a perfect score. Someone seems to have a college counselor who knows exactly what to do.
Then the family WhatsApp conversations begin. Parents hear one story from another parent. Students hear five more from friends. Slowly, the question changes. Instead of asking what makes sense for this child, the family starts asking whether they are falling behind.
Once that happens, the application process can get bent out of shape before anyone realizes it.
Comparison gives families incomplete information
The first problem is simple: families almost never know the full story.
You may know that another student got into a strong university. You may know their test score or one headline activity. You probably do not know the full transcript, course rigor, recommendation strength, essay quality, intended major, financial aid status, timing, institutional priorities, or how the file was read inside that particular admissions office.
Even when the other family is being honest, the story is still incomplete.
Admissions outcomes are easy to narrate backwards. Once a student is admitted, everyone starts looking for the reason. It must have been the research paper. It must have been the debate award. It must have been the summer school. It must have been the essay about the grandmother.
Sometimes one element helped. Often, the answer is more boring and more complicated. The application made sense as a whole. The student was credible for the academic direction. The recommendations supported the story. The essays gave the reader a person, not just a list of accomplishments. The college had a reason to admit that student in that round.
When families copy one visible piece without understanding the rest of the application, they are usually copying the wrong thing.
The college list starts reacting to other people
Comparison first shows up in the college list.
A student may have a sensible list in August. A few reaches, some realistic targets, and safeties the family can genuinely afford and accept. Then school gossip starts. Someone with similar marks is applying to ten Ivy League schools. Someone else has added MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford, Imperial, and every brand name the family recognizes.
The original list starts looking small.
Parents ask, “Shouldn’t we also try?” Students ask, “Am I aiming too low?” A list built around fit slowly becomes a list built around fear.
There is nothing wrong with ambition. I would never tell a strong student not to apply to a reach school just because the odds are low. But adding reach schools because another student is applying there is not strategy. It is anxiety with a spreadsheet.
Rejection is the obvious risk. The less obvious risk is wasted attention. The student spends time on applications that were never a good intellectual, social, financial, or emotional fit. Meanwhile, schools where the student could have written a stronger application get less attention.
This is one reason I keep coming back to list discipline. A college list should have ambition in it, but it also needs judgment. We wrote about this from another angle in our post on why profile building is often more about elimination than addition. The same idea applies to college lists. More names can feel safer while making the actual strategy weaker.
Activities become harder to read
The second distortion is activities. I see students lose a lot of time here.
A student who likes economics hears that someone else is doing machine learning research. Now economics feels ordinary. A student who has spent two years helping run a school club hears about a classmate’s nonprofit and starts wondering whether leadership “counts” only if it has a logo and an Instagram page. A student who reads deeply and writes well starts feeling inadequate because the visible achievements around them look more technical, more global, or more expensive.
So the student begins adding activities late.
Not because they are curious. Not because the work connects to anything they have already done. Because the application feels exposed.
Admissions readers can usually sense this. A last-minute activity often has a different texture. It may sound impressive in the title, but the student’s explanation is thin. The work does not connect to the intended major, the essays, the recommendations, or the rest of the profile. The student can describe what they did, but not why they stayed with it or what changed in their thinking.
By this point, comparison has moved the student away from their own evidence.
This is also why I am cautious about manufactured activity building. A small project the student genuinely owns can be more useful than an impressive-looking opportunity that belongs mostly to an adult’s network. We made that case in more detail in our piece on small student projects.
Essays start sounding defensive
The essay damage is quieter.
Students who compare constantly often start writing defensively. They feel they need to prove they are not less impressive than the people around them. The essay becomes crowded with achievement. Every paragraph tries to justify the student. There is less room for honesty, curiosity, doubt, humor, or reflection.
Sometimes the student chooses a topic because it sounds more “admissions-worthy” than the topic that actually matters to them. They write about leadership instead of the small intellectual habit that explains them better. They write about impact instead of the conversation that changed how they think. They write about resilience because it sounds serious, even when the more revealing essay is about a quiet obsession, a family routine, a failed experiment, or a question they cannot leave alone.
The result may be polished, but it does not feel lived in.
Essays are one of the few places where the admissions reader can meet the student directly. If the essay is written from comparison, the reader often meets the student’s anxiety first.
Essay work cannot begin only with the prompt. The prompt gives shape, but the material has to come from the student. We wrote more about this in College essays do not start with the prompt.
Indian students face a sharper version of this
In India, comparison has extra fuel.
Marks are public in many school cultures. Coaching ranks are discussed. Parents hear about other students through social circles. School corridors carry half-true admissions stories. LinkedIn makes every teenager look like a founder, researcher, author, or changemaker. And for students applying abroad, the uncertainty of holistic admissions makes comparison even more tempting.
If JEE or NEET is the reference point, comparison feels almost natural. There is a rank. There is a percentile. There is a visible ladder.
US and UK admissions do not work that way. The lack of a single ladder makes families uncomfortable, so they create one informally. Who has the strongest activity? Who has the best essay coach? Who is applying where? Who got an interview? Who submitted test scores? Who heard back first?
Most of that ladder is noise.
It may tell you what other families are doing. It does not tell you what your child should do next.
Comparison is not useless
I do not think students should live in a bubble.
Seeing what strong peers are doing can be useful. It can raise standards. It can show a student what serious work looks like. It can reveal possibilities the student had not considered. A student who has never seen anyone pursue independent research or build a serious project may benefit from seeing that such paths exist.
The danger begins when comparison becomes instruction.
Another student’s path can give you information. It should not become your child’s template.
If a classmate’s project makes your child think, “I also want to explore something properly,” that can be healthy. If it makes them think, “I need my own version of that project by next month,” the process has already turned reactive.
Ask what exactly is being compared
When a student feels behind, I would not begin by telling them to ignore everyone else. That rarely works.
I would ask a more practical question: what exactly are you comparing?
If you are comparing effort, maybe there is something to learn. Is another student reading more seriously, seeking feedback earlier, or taking ownership of their work? A student can learn from that without copying the other person’s application.
If you are comparing labels, be careful. Research, startup, nonprofit, internship, and founder can mean very different things depending on the depth of the work. A modest activity done with real thought may say more than an impressive label with little substance behind it.
If you are comparing outcomes, be even more careful. You cannot reverse-engineer admissions from one admit.
The more useful question is: what is the strongest honest version of this student?
It takes longer to answer, and it will not give the quick comfort of copying someone else’s plan. But it usually leads to decisions the student can stand behind.
What parents can do
Parents often think comparison motivates students. Sometimes it does. More often, it makes them perform confidence while quietly losing clarity.
If your child brings up another student’s achievement, resist the urge to convert it immediately into a task.
Instead of asking, “Why haven’t you done something like that?” ask, “What part of that actually interests you?”
The answer may be nothing. That is allowed. Or the student may say, “I like that they built something real,” or “I wish I had a mentor,” or “I want my work to feel more serious.”
Now you have something useful.
You can help the student translate envy into information. Maybe they need a more focused project. Maybe they need better reading. Maybe they need to stop adding activities and start making sense of the work they have already done. Maybe the real issue is exhaustion.
Parents also need to be careful with second-hand admissions stories. If you hear that someone got into a top university because of one activity, treat that as a partial story. Do not rebuild your child’s next six months around it.
What students can do
For students, I would start with a simple audit.
Look at your current activities, classes, reading, projects, family responsibilities, and interests. Ask what keeps showing up. What do you return to when nobody is assigning it? Which problems annoy you enough that you keep thinking about them? Which subjects make you slower in a good way, because you actually want to understand them?
Then look at your application plan.
Does your college list match those interests and constraints? Do your activities support the academic direction you claim? Do your essays sound like you, or like someone trying to keep up with a room full of high-achievers? Are you adding things because they make sense, or because someone else has them?
I am not arguing for lower ambition. I am arguing for a more disciplined kind of ambition, one that starts with the student’s real material.
Some students do need to stretch more. Some need more academic depth. Some need stronger testing. Some need a more realistic list. Some need to stop chasing visible achievements and spend time understanding what they already have.
The answer depends on the student.
The application should still belong to the student
By the end of the process, a strong application should feel recognizable to the student.
It does not have to be perfect. It will never be immune to rejection. It does not have to look more impressive than every classmate’s application. But the student should recognize themselves in it.
The student should be able to say, “Yes, this is what I have cared about. This is how I think. This is what I have tried. This is where I want to go next.”
That kind of application is harder to build when the student is constantly looking sideways.
If your family is in Class 10 or 11 and comparison is already shaping activities, college lists, or essay choices, it may be worth pausing before the calendar gets crowded. At AltView, we help students build an application around their actual strengths, not the loudest story in the school corridor. If that is a conversation your family needs, you can book a discovery call with us.
Source note
This post was partly prompted by a student discussion on Reddit’s ApplyingToCollege community about comparison in competitive school environments. I have used it as a broad signal of applicant anxiety, not as formal admissions data.