Published Aug 14, 2004
Both of the teams I’m in did pretty well in their first week! My core group, A, took second in the Teamwork at Marshall day (tied with B), we came in second in the mechanical bull ride (I did my best to help us out there — even my former Wonderful Girlfriend was impressed with my ride), and we got 50 extra points for having the most spirit.
My study group — perhaps the most important group in my first year — did great too. Not only did we do well in naming, etc, but, in our first exercise, we placed tied for second among 12 groups in Core A!
The exercise was simple. We were locked in a room together and shown a video of a plane crashing in the arctic wilderness. We were given a list of things we’d salvaged from the crash and asked to rank the things in order of importance. We did this individually, then merged our individual lists into a group list. Then we compared the list to an expert’s list and came up with a score that was the difference between our ranking and the expert’s ranking. The Ocho had both the second-highest score and the second-highest improvement between our individual scores and our group score — the improvement meant we worked better together than alone. One poor group had a substantial decrease between their individual and group scores; they might not work so well together.
But The Ocho came through strong. We got off on the wrong foot, but came together and finished with a good process that gave us a result we were very comfortable with. I’m excited about my group! Let’s see how it goes in the second week.