Saturday, November 7, 2009

Trust in Classmates

One of my favorite things I discovered when I came to World's Best School is that there are many, many people here who are like me. Driven like me, dedicated like me, and many much smarter than me. This incredible place where I am surrounded by an army of geniuses has had several advantages.

One is that it is vastly easier to trust my classmates. In undergrad, group projects were always a crapshoot. Your teammates can make or break a project - that's a commonly known fact. In undergrad, I always had to worry "Will I get a good team, will I have teammates who won't pull their share, will there be team members who don't have a clue what they are doing?" If any of those were true, it meant a lot more work for me - checking other people's work, harping on people to get their share done. It got easier as I became an upperclassman, because I finally knew most of my classmates and I could try and get in teams I knew would be good.

I was worried when I got to World's Best School, because I didn't know anybody and I had to jump right into project classes. But a fantastic thing happened. EVERYBODY here is a good teammate. Well, nearly everybody. In an astonishing turn of events, I sometimes have to struggle to keep up MY end!

And now I get to enjoy the benefits. Both of my classes are project classes, and this weekend I am working on both projects. I already finished my part for one class, and sent it off to the rest of the team. Now I get to sit back and TRUST that they will finish the rest of the assignment. And I do trust them. They are capable, they are motivated, and I don't have to worry. It's a fantastic feeling to lean on colleagues and feel that support.

Now if I could only finish my section of the OTHER class project, so that my teammates there can trust ME. :)

1 comment:

  1. I haven't commented before, but I've been reading your blog and I'm really enjoying reading about a woman (or just anybody) who's doing academic stuff and is happy and fascinated and whatnot. I've been considering engineering for when I'm all big and grown up (I'm still in high school), and this is encouraging and helps me see that it can be done.

    That you write so well is just icing on the cake.

    And it's a relief to hear that there's something in the future other than writing the entire lab report myself.

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