As far as I can remember, I always preferred to work alone, whether it was for school or for work. I probably share very similar reasons why most of us prefer to work alone, in that it feels like it requires more effort to work together than to just work alone. I always felt afraid that I would have to pick up other peoples’ slack, or set aside additional time to consistently meet teammates for communication and delegating responsibilities accordingly.
And this has been unfortunately true in some of the situations in my life. Just last year, I was involved in a four person group project where we had to design an interactive front-end user interface for a Cooking app. Unfortunately, we had one member of our group become less and less involved, until he eventually stopped responding altogether. My teammates and I had to pick up his responsibilities, so that we could have a project completed for submission in time.
Another example is when I used to work as a server at a restaurant, we would have other servers constantly calling out of their shift last minute. So us remaining servers would have to cover that co-worker’s tables and responsibilities, resulting in us having less satisfied customers, and therefore less tips.
However, this is not always the case. From working in the real world, I learned to see the value in working with a team. At my current job as a tech support at a bank software company, I constantly face issues that I cannot resolve for my clients on the spot. Fortunately, we do have a ticketing system where we can escalate the situation further to our company’s engineers, who can then analyze our findings in order to resolve the issue. Without being able to have my coworkers to look at these issues, there would be a lot of items that I would not be able to troubleshoot on my own.
And even in retrospect, earlier when I complained about having to cover for a coworker’s tables as a server at the restaurant, I realized it actually goes both ways in that I was able to call out last minute too, whenever I was feeling sick or had some sort of emergency. So although it can be difficult to work as a team sometimes, I realize that there is a lot of good from working as a team, that you cannot do if you were on your own.
As I approach this capstone project working with two classmates that I have never had to work with before, I honestly do feel a little anxious, having to work out the communication and responsibilities among all of us. However, I do realize that my teammates can bring a lot of value to this project that I myself would not be able to bring. That if ever I need further help or assistance, I can always reach out to them (and vice versa).