Everywhere we turn at Yale, leadership is the prism through which our success and worth are evaluated. Professors praise and academic prizes reward classroom leadership. Student culture is far worse: I watch classmate after classmate fall into a sickening rat race of institutional ladder-climbing.

The message we are receiving is overwhelming: If by the time you graduate you have not been the musical director of an a cappella group, the editor-in-chief of a publication, the captain of a sports team, the president of a cultural group and the chairman of a political society, then you probably shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.

On its most basic level, leadership culture suffocates individual students, pushing us in ill-fitting directions and creating bizarre incentives. How many of us find ourselves devoting hundreds of hours into causes we care little about in a desperate climb to official leadership? In the process, we lose hundreds of irretrievable hours we may have spent studying and serving causes closer to our hearts. Worse, we perform our duties shallowly and opaquely, looking for accolades and positive feedback rather than genuine accomplishment. This is an impressionable time, and these are the worst sorts of work habits we could possibly be forming.