Only competition makes this class.

1. Self Esteem: Can soon become non-existent, if it depends on just outcomes.

2. Competition: Can destroy 1 above.

As a student in the computer science programme at IIT Madras, I was of the strong opinion that most people in the class were a bit off the usual. Well, they were expected to be, you might say, all of them had to make it through a gruelling examination and come out on top or do very well in the first semester at college. But they are different in a different sort of way as the "winners"/victims of excessive competition are likely to be.

If you do run into one of the guys (girls, luckily seem to be above all this), and cannot see the Halo around their heads, which other competitive individuals aware of their achievements do, consider yourself rather unlucky.
For most of them will strike you as merely usually slightly eccentric, some outrightly so and as a general interesting aside - ordinary looking :) (unlike what's expected as some people who've never been to the IITs but only heard of their 'magnificence' say)

Well, before someone says, speak for yourself,

Being a member of this class, I must admit to my own eccentricities too, the major one - an obsession with competition that seems to need tremendous soul searching to get rid of.

And various less important others (provided solely for entertainment below!) such as:
1. Searching for free stuff on gumtree.com and good bargains on ebay when I don't really need anything.
2. Going through blogs and websites (esp. rediff.com and econtimes.com, given) even when I know there's never going to be anything useful there
3. And a general absent-mindedness which makes sure i pocket any bunch of keys i find much to the consternation of their owners, and keep banana peels in my schoolbag for weeks to keep London clean and make biomanure in the front pouch.

But my most severe symptoms used to be the following,
1. A general mistrust of people especially if they could be competition. So I would never trust you if you told me you lost the book I wanted to borrow from you.
2. An obsessive curiosity about who's doing what, even if they have no relation to what I am going to do.
3. And my most worrying one - An association of self esteem to achievement and thus, outcomes, which is most worrying.

No 3 is a classic case, the university you get into for postgrad, the job you get after that, and perhaps the pay are all potential 'uplift'ers/destroyers of self esteem.
Given the number of desired jobs there are and the number of people who want them, it is likely that they destroy than uplift for most.

And the fourth year at college and the past few placement seasons at the IIMs were fantastic windows for observation.
From those who did not get into the universities(the IIMs included) they wanted when everybody else around them was to
Those who couldn't get the company or the pay they wanted to maintain their current self esteem at the IIMs and find it extremely difficult to mail friends, talk to relatives, classmates and colleagues, and these days, post blogs or scraps,
All of them are all classic examples of people who manage to get by in, what anthropologist Jules Henry put as, “a competitive culture endures by tearing people down."