It seems that everyone has a secret superpower. Your freckly red-headed freshman year quadmate turns out to be a world-renowned ping-pong player. Your best friend’s boyfriend went to the National Spelling Bee at age twelve and was, in fact, featured in the documentary “Spellbound.” Your vaguely attractive punky social manager had a weekly radio show in his hometown. And apparently your dorky neighbor from sophomore year, who worked on problem sets more than he slept, is in fact one of America’s best flautists. You think back on your own high-school resume and the only things that jump to mind are your participation on the high school diving team — the swim team requiring too much cardiovascular exertion — and your jaunt in the food service industry at Cowboy Burgers.

Even though there are some us that didn’t perfect an esoteric skill during early-childhood, we all worked hard in high-school, and our Type A personalities have at the very least gotten us here. However, if you take 1,600 Type A personalities a year, put 300 of them in one class and then put seven of them in a room for hours at time during weekly study sessions, what you get is one gigantor gurgling black pit of nerd pride.

Nerd pride, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own geeky dignity, dweeby importance and wonky merit,” abounds on campus. Everyone is taking the HumBio core, switching into CS 106X, going pre-med. When you ask an acquaintance at lunch what she is up to that day, you ears are barraged with a onslaught of extra-curriculars — it is hard to go from the gym to interviews for Stanford Consulting to tutoring six graders in East Palo Alto because she has to pack so many different sets of clothes in the morning. You ask Acquaintance #2 what he is up to this weekend, and you get hit with an unexpected and sidelong bombardment of homework — two problem sets, a bio lab at 9am on Saturday, one midterm, two response papers and a take-home essay test for Monday. Acquaintance #1 pipes in that she doesn’t think that the problem sets in bio have been that hard so far, and that hopefully the midterm will probably be relatively easy. ‘Please God,’ you whisper under your breath as start to expect the worst. Then #2 narrows his eyes, grits his teeth and cocks his head; suddenly a casual explication of weekend plans has now transformed into fierce passive-aggressive nerd pride one-upmanship. The two competitors are pitted head-to-head in a struggle to the death as they compare the difficulty of their classes, their respective work loads and the negative amount of free-time their extra-curricular-packed lives allot them for both.

The nerd pride battle is as common as a wasted freshman on a Friday night. And I know I have been a competitor on occasion. How can you let someone else complain about their workload when you can barely find enough time to shower a couple of times a week, and Webmaster is threatening to bounce all of your e-mails unless you clean out your inbox? We seem almost compelled to share and compare what we do — even if it so often seems a self-congratulation of our ability to juggle it all.

We have nerd pride and we are nerd proud about it. We get good grades, we work out, we help the community. But we rarely disclose how many hours of studying we logged to get an ‘A’ on the final, or how we stopped tutoring last quarter because we were too overloaded with school. No one mentions the C+’s, the incompletes, the dropped classes or the twelve-unit quarters that include Beginning Yoga. It is hard for us to admit defeat, and even harder for us to talk about it. We don’t want to be the non-deserving legacy kid or the unfortunate struggling student. It seems as if we are surrounded exclusively by Overachieving McGraws and Office-Hour-Going McGees who are unaware that a ‘B’ is not just a pollinating insect. And we will do anything to keep our cover.

But less than a 4.0 GPA isn’t embarrassing, it’s a more-than-realistic actuality. Studying hard doesn’t mean you are stupid, it means you spend time going over material so you can remember it. Unashamedly, I can tell you that my resume isn’t perfect; I don’t know what I want to do after I graduate and I think school is hard.

So here’s to all of us that don’t have a national ranking, a research grant, a killer internship, a Rhodes scholarship or a shot at the Olympics. Here’s to the students who struggle to get a ‘B,’ who try to go the gym but all too often end up watching Netflix-ed movies in their sweatpants, who study more than others, who took CS 106A instead — we are all trying our best, and if it is any consolation, I think we might turn out okay in the end despite it all.

If your transcript also looks like a bunch of pollinating insects in spring, then e-mail Katie at kttaylor@stanford.edu