Teamwork


From group projects to internships, I have been in numerous team settings and have encountered countless types of people. I always have a story to tell regarding my team experience in interviews, because there was always that one person who affected my expectation of the team, of course in a negative way. Although I was not the leader of the team, whether it’s a group project or an activity, I always envisioned myself getting along with the team members, socializing on top of the works. However, because my workload always changed significantly, due to one or two member’s uncooperativeness, I was in the stressful state, trying to get the work done as soon as possible and leave the group.

For today’s blog post, I want to share about a different aspect of the teamwork. I was especially attracted to Bolman and Deal’s section on the pros and cons of self-managing teams, because I was able to link back to my experience in a team.

In summer 2018, I stayed on campus to take courses. Along with the courses, I worked as data analyst research intern for a professor. We were hired through the ATLAS internship program, so the instructions were given through the coordinator. I had a chance to meet with the professor on the kick-off meeting along with a teammate that I was going to work with. We sat through the meeting and heard lots of information about what research she is conducting and what particular research we are going to be part of. Turns out, she just started the project, so we are hired to build fundamentals on top of the data she has already gathered.

In the following week, both of us received a shared box folder full of data files. I awaited for couple days, but did not receive much instruction other than an email that stated she shared the data folder with us and some links to data. Because this work was done remotely, as two of us met throughout the week, we could not ask the professor what to do face to face. After meeting with the other intern, we came to realize, both of us are new to research and do not know where to begin. So we contacted the professor, but did not receive any response back. We had to go to the coordinator to ask if she knows about anything and turns out our professor was in a foreign country with limited access to internet.

The coordinator was kind enough to lead us what she thinks the professor will find helpful of, since she worked with the professor for other projects too. But that was not enough. Two of us had to build our plan on what we could do for the next few weeks before the professor returned. Two of us met up every two days to discuss what we found out about the data that the professor left for us. We also started to do some research on how a research begins. As we have done that, we looked for other works to do, such as finding more data relevant to her research topic and organizing those data by creating appendix.

I believe because both of us had no experience in research and we were not being instructed clearly on what to do, we only had each other to rely on and discover what we could do throughout the internship. Turned out that the professor was very satisfied by the work, the appendix, that we created, which was can be organized by the source, year, or categories. This research experience could have been better if I had a supervision and was able to learn from the professor, but I was certainly glad that I had this experience to open my eyes in what self-starting and self managing work can be in the future job setting.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 5, 2019 at 10:21 AM

    I was surprised to hear that in your prior group experience you always had at least one shirker on the team. I wonder if it is such a good idea to tell that to recruiters. There is an expression "blame the victim." In this case it may be that the recruiters somehow think you are the one responsible for your teammates poor performance. Or the may think that you get annoyed when somebody else makes a minor transgression. In any case, since you did worry about this in the example you reported on, I wonder if you have received any coaching about how to behave during an interview with a recruiter. If you have received such coaching, did the issue come up there?

    Regarding your experience doing research with the professor's data, that she was pleased is nice to hear, of course, but I wonder if the underlying research questions she had in mind were well communicated to you. I suspect that many researchers themselves don't know what to do with data when they first gain access to it. Instead they have to familiarize themselves with the dataset and play with it in a variety of different ways before the questions suggest themselves.

    If that's right, then that sort of exploration was delegated to the two of you. In some sense, not having supervision may have been a blessing to experience the more unstructured approach where you have to figure it out on your own. I think you'll find out later in life that such direction is often absent and you have to learn to direct your own inquiry and trust your own judgment.

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    Replies
    1. Joan Robinson Econ 490 fall 2019October 7, 2019 at 8:05 PM

      I believe there was lack of instruction because all two of us received were a folder of data. And yes, I feel like this experience have given me the opportunity to explore on our own. In the past, whenever I had a question, I waited until I had a chance to ask and resolve the question. In such a situation, if I had chosen to go for my prior approach, I could have done nothing, since the professor only returned three weeks after the internship. My teammate, in this case, was a great initiator in suggesting what needed to be done and allowed me to give my insights on what we could do.

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