What? So What? Now What?

During the community service event I noticed a lot of team bonding and interactions between students from different research fellowships. It was interesting to meet and learn about what other students on campus are doing for the summer, and what types of research they are interested in. It was also cool to meet students and work together on building leadership and team bonding skills while doing the team activities and building the bike.

Because my team ran into some problems with the brakes on our bike while building, I learned more about how brakes on bikes work and how to fix them. Other than that I enhanced my leadership skills and my ability to work in a team. I expected the event to be more oriented on the community service aspect, rather than the team aspect. While I am glad we bonded as teams and had that opportunity, I wish we would have taken more time on the community service part. Our team was smaller than some others in our area, but still, we could not have everyone really involved in working on the bike, and therefore we probably could have built two bikes and had more people involved. I also think it would have been nice to have more interaction with the kid we were building the bike for, maybe have him help us putting the bike together when there was something that could have been done.

I think what is most important to bring back to my lab is the collaboration aspect. We made it through most of the team building exercises pretty quickly, which was because we collaborated well. People step up and took leadership positions, but no one dominated that role. Ideas were shared freely and that helped us in succeeding. In a lab setting, collaboration will lead to success. In my lab there are quite a few people whose work is similar and by sharing ideas everyone benefits.