Working with a Team

Getting thrown into a group of people that you don't necessarily know is quite the  experience. Add that to immediately getting assigned tasks and expected to work together, you have an interesting challenge.

Getting in my group, I was lucky, because I knew both Brandon and Kishore pretty well. Brandon and I are good friends, and Kishore and I have worked together in previous classes. John I didn't know, but he is quite the pleasant fellow and was easy to get along with. All of us were quite willing to work together, which made the initial experience enjoyable and painless.

I could imagine working with strangers or just peers that you don't like could be pretty tough. Not only do you have to work with your partners, you have to trust them to do their part of the workload. If you have a team member you can't trust, you have an entire team you can't trust and then you have a team that can't produce anything.

Like I said, this is not the case for me. Hopefully it's not the case for any group. But this experience has taught me how important the group is. Therefore, in the future, I think when selecting a group, you should be able to choose based on who else is going to be in a group. For example, if someone I don't want to work with is going to be on a project I want to work on, it might change my mind.

Now, I realize, in the real world, you won't always get to choose who you work with. You're going to have to deal with the partners you're assigned to in a lot of cases. But, if you're offered a job with a peer or group of peers that you don't want to work with, you have the choice of not accepting that job. However, in this class, if you're put in a group with people you don't like, you have no choice in the matter.