Coming to Muhlenberg College I have had the ability to refine many of my skills as I attempt to prepare myself for working life. One of such skills that I believe I have been able to development the most thus far is my team working skills. Team work is and never has been a foreign concept to me as I have played sports my whole life and understand how a well working team beats individual efforts ten out of ten times. However saying this, before college not much of my academic life had teamwork so rigorously integrated within it, as much of High school and the results that you got in Australia (where I grew up) is driven by competition – both with your peers as well as those other schools in your state. Thus, coming to Muhlenberg has helped me to continue to build on my team working skills within many different academic disciplines. The consistency of group work being incorporated within so many of my classes has improved the way in which I approach much of my work and furthermore has assisted me in enhancing my academic performance within such settings. Moreover it has been the regular activity of working within these teams, across varying disciplines, that has has helped me appreciate just how valuable diversity can be to a project. It is this diversity in perspective as well as skill sets that helps to create a very strong foundation from which members of the team can use as a spring board to bounce ideas off each other, critic work, brain storm and achieve various other goals that would otherwise be more difficult.

Examples of team work:

1. The first of which was my Innovation and Entrepreneurship class, where over the course of the semester we had to (in small groups) create an authentic business proposal and present it to the class. Our groups proposal was a low to middle class furniture rental company. Our planned target market included juniors and seniors in college that needed to furnish and decorate their rooms but didn’t want to go through the hassle or expense for a place that they would essentially only live in for a year. Before these presentations each of the groups in the class were given one hundred thousand dollars ($500,000 in the entire class) to invest in the company/group that they felt most confident would be successful within the real world. After presenting and each group investing their respective money our company had won first prize with a total investment of $200,000 beating the next closest group by a staggering $50,000. As I look back at the presentation (the powerpoint of which is attached) I don’t think that we had the best idea in class. Saying that however, I do think that we were excelled in the class in terms of how we utilized the skills and unique perspectives that each member of our group had to offer. For example one of the members of our group had work experience as a real estate agent and property developer in Philadelphia which helped tremendously in getting accurate estimates of many of the costs that would be associated with our operations. While two others (including myself) brought some knowledge of accounting and financial planning which helped us to generate believable and positive financial predictions for the company as well as other necessary information, such as a predicted company break-even analysis. It was our groups team work and only that team work that helped us come up with such a realistic business plan that when presented to the class and our teacher seemed worthy of investment compared to that of our competitors.

2. The second project (again attached below) that I have worked on as a sophomore at Muhlenberg was in my Operations and Information systems class. It was in this class that we did a ‘technology project’ about internet security and its importance to companies logistical systems all across the globe. This can be a very dense subject as with the growth of technology more and more research is being done into how to more safely secure the private information and assets of companies. Such internet security is very important particularly within supply chain management as often as often this is a weak link that many companies struggle to protect due to how they connect their systems with that of their suppliers, manufacturers and so on. This provides an opening within companies that hackers can use to breach what would otherwise strong security systems. This assignment was worked on for about half of our semester. And although my group didn’t necessarily do the best in the class why I remember it and value it so highly as an experience, was because even though we hadn’t all met as a group before Muhlenberg was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic we worked well and efficiently with each other. Additionally, it was despite this challenge and further challenges, such as different group members being in different time zones all across America as well as the world (myself in Australia for example), that we did an excellent job of communicating with each other and cohesively working on our project so to make sure that it was finished and to an acceptable standard by the time it came to present it. It is through our communication as a group that we were able to stay on top of what was a considerable work load without adding to much pressure on any individual in what was and continues to be a global state of emergency, the effects of which have been crippling in many cases when looking at productivity and quality of work, not only in a college setting up also in the entire global economy.