During my college experience at Georgia State University and with the Honors College, I have experienced many engagements with downward social comparison. Even though it may sound arrogant; because I am with the Honors College, it is a natural comparison process with my friends. The majority of my friends are not with the Honors College, so when I tell them about the great accomplishments that I am achieving with it, such as my UAP job, my participation with LEAD with Honors, and a variety of other social events, I feel like I am more involved than that of my non-Honors College counterparts. For example, my roommate last year was not in the Honors College, but I was. We were taking the same class, which was POLS 1101, except my class was an Honors class and his was just a regular class. When we compared our syllabi, my course seemed less stressful even though the course only had two tests that determined your entire grade. By the way, I made an A in the class. Besides this, I didn’t seem all that stressed because I already knew how Honors courses worked compared to regular courses, and that I was going to do well. This boosted my entire self esteem level and made me feel good about my participation with the Honors College. I also felt bad for my roommate who had to struggle with his POLS 1101 course, to the point where he was not learning the material as well, and just became frustrated with the topic; and was very anti-political science. While he saw me performing well in my American Government course and he was struggling, he made an upward social comparison, which did lower his self-esteem levels a bit, but he took the initiative to ask me for help and strove to do better in the course.

At this point in the semester, the applications for the Honors College had gone out for potential applicants, and my roommate ended up applying. He told me that he wanted to be a part of it because of all the opportunities I was being offered; as well as wanting to receive that quality education where he would actually learn something instead of just studying for tests the day before the exam. I am glad that he made the upward social comparison to how I was doing since it boosted my confidence levels, as well as painted him a picture of what he wanted to make himself known for. When the results came back, we celebrated as he was eventually accepted into the Honors College! Even though we are not roommates now, I wanted to wish him the best of luck with all his endeavors and am glad that he saw an image in me and strove to perform better in school, as well as becoming more involved by becoming employed and serving his community with various civic engagement opportunities.

As for our group project and how our selection process is going, we are hoping to each bring a topic on Friday during class so we can discuss what we want to do. We are just kind of going with the flow as of right now, and we will have a confirmed decision (hopefully) by this coming Friday. I had the idea of correlating studies between children in the relation to college students, we just don’t know what we want to have our topic as. All we know right now is that we want to include children in our project.