Teamwork

Coursework

Throughout my two years as a graduate student, I have been placed in many different group settings with my colleagues where I have learned and grown as a teammate in my ability to hold myself and others accountable, become more flexible, maintain a positive attitude, and become welcome to collaboration. In the classroom, I learned to actively engage with my peers and professors on a variety of discussion topics, and in many circumstances, this meant listening and respectfully reacting to opinions and values that did not align with my own. Additionally, a majority of my courses in graduate school involved being split into teams for a group project. In these groups, I learned the importance of becoming more flexible, as many of us at the Bush School took four courses a semester, were apart of other group projects, worked part-time, volunteered with outside organizations, and/or were involved with a club on campus. Becoming more flexible included being open to meet with the group to work on the weekends, working late hours, and/or resorting to video chat when meeting in person was not an option.

In group settings, I also had to learn that not everyone learns and works the same way I do and that meant sometimes assignments would be completed closer to the due date than I anticipated. These situations taught me how it is important to establish roles in a group and internal deadlines to make sure that we as a team are holding ourselves accountable. In the group settings where we set internal deadlines that ultimately led to more collaboration and less work getting placed upon one individual toward the end of the semester or group project deadline.

As an example of my teamwork, during my first year at the Bush School, I collaborated with a team of four to develop a research project on voter education in the United States and how to increase youth voter participation rates through education. Later in the year, our team completed another research report on crime at the Texas and Mexico border in connection to the relationships between the state and the federal government. Working in such a diverse group I was able to learn from my colleagues and this positive group experience set me up for success in future group settings I had throughout my graduate school experience.

The Cato Institute

Interning with the Cato Institute in 2019 was important in providing me with different teamwork dynamics necessary to successfully navigate my final capstone course at the Bush School. My experiences at Cato not only advanced my statistical and technical skills but also provided me with an opportunity to work on multiple different teams at a given time. With the welfare department, I worked directly with the research associate, had brief daily meetings with the welfare team, and then collaborated with research associates and interns from different departments depending on the project at the time. Working on multiple different teams enhanced my communication abilities as I learned how to quickly switch my tone and vocabulary depending on which team I was working with at the time. My intern cohort also had daily educational seminars and occasional get-togethers, fostering another different type of collaboration and friendship amongst my peers.