> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people This may be the case for career academics (professors), but in my experience, as a PhD

> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people This may be the case for career academics (professors), but in my experience, as a PhD student, at least in a day-to-day setting my fellow students were remarkably friendly and collaborative. The camaraderie within my advisor's group and within the dept as a whole was great; we were always happy to bounce ideas off of each other, always friendly and encouraging, mostly constructive in criticism, and it was generally pretty productive. I think this type of rivalry comes out much more between different research groups at different schools. I can recall a number of times we thought some other group's paper was full of crap, and asked questions as such (usually politely) after the conference talk. But that mostly comes from a tradition of academic debate, not a 'shoot down everyone else so I can win' attitude. I didn't stay for the "go on the job talk circuit and fight for a tenure-track slot" stage (actually I left before the "defend and graduate" stage, oh well), so maybe I'm just pleasantly lacking the visceral experience of that part...