SKILLS AND VALUES
Collaboration
Demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively in teams and exercise leadership skills on projects
Working as a team is always important. An individual must leave if they refuse to mesh well with the culture of the team or supply helpful feedback. I’ve encountered a few of these type of individuals throughout my college and professional careers, and the end result is usually always the same. They usually end up out of the group and on their own assignment or they begrudgingly stay on until the due date while keeping their attitude the same throughout.
The opposite of this behavior started early with me when I went through boy scouts and played soccer for most of my younger life. Boy scouts puts you in plenty of situations where you must work as a team in order to achieve a goal. Soccer forces you to play as a team, feeding off each other, to control a match.
I’m always keeping myself open to outside ideas and trying to lead with a helpful attitude. There are a couple of group projects below where I was able to help lead or through collaboration to reach our final goal.
The first project is from LDEV 687 (Development Feasibility and Design) where I worked on a team to review documents on a project our professor had given us. We were to do due diligence on these documents in order to decide if the developer should go through with the project or not. My group members and I worked together well and were able to decide on the correct solution when presenting to our class.
The second project is from my first Landscape Architecture internship with LandPatterns in Dallas, TX. Another coworker (around my age fresh from college) and myself were given a project in Fort Worth, TX that would be redesigning parts of the famous Stockyards for a concrete convention coming to town. We had to show the versatility of the material in a unique design. I was able to take the lead on the project due to my coworker having a couple other projects of his own. We surveyed and documented the project site, and were able to come up with a idea that I’m still proud about nearly 3 years later. Of course I was already nervous leading my first real world project, but on the delivery date my boss surprised my coworker and I that we would be the ones presenting the idea to the interested parties without his help. Being new to all this I could have backed down, but I stepped up the plate and swung as hard as I could. The presentation went really well, and now looking back, I’m glad that my boss pushed me so hard to try new, uncomfortable things.