Last week I had the pleasure of attending Christa Downey’s talk at the Rose Cafe.  She had a lot of great advice but the key point that resonated with me was the importance of teamwork.  She talked a lot about how to make a team work, both on the job and in school.  So many of us have struggled working in teams, often because we find ourselves engrossed in the project and stuck with students who aren’t as interested or willing to put in the work.  Christa emphasized that we shouldn’t accept that and we shouldn’t be taking all of the work on ourselves, because that’s not a healthy team dynamic either.  Rather, communication is extremely important and we need to make sure we’re all on the same page with our teammates.

Besides the typical thought of teamwork as some students working together on a class project, Christa also focused on the importance of your own personal team for career and life planning.  Everyone should have a support team/network of different people to reach out to for different things.  Maybe one friend is really good at solving friend conflicts, while another can help you work through that week’s challenging accounting problem set.  Both are valuable friends and you should strive to be the same for someone else.  If we all build strong networks and friendships, we can all feed off of each other and work together to be successful in anything we do.  Christa challenged us to grow our networks during our time here at Cornell, both with students and faculty.

In my mind, the moral of her talk was without the teamwork, the dream – professional or personal – can’t work.