To Team Or Not To Team

 To begin with, I did finalize my decision to work on my own for my portfolio project based on results from the social media analysis activity, the lost at sea team activity, and articles that we entered into the annotated bibliography.  

First of all, I want to reference how the articles analyzed in class influenced my decision. The first article that I analyzed was “Team building and group dynamics: creating and fostering a culture of teamwork requires trust, collaboration, and accountability” by Eli Becker, where he bases his article off of the experiences of Darci Kleindl, who was thrust into a tough position of managing and working with a large group of people, which she overcame. The author states, “The group was also facing a large organizational shift” which is similar to my situation because I feel that I do work better on my own and it would be a challenging adjustment to work on a big project with a group. The second article I read was Collective action: Collaboration, rebellion, creative dialogue: Surrealism as ideological defiance, by Georgina Coburn, where she also elaborates on working together in groups. This author’s point is that innovative artists throughout history have not mixed well when trying to share and popularize styles that are exclusive to them, and I think this relates to my interests because not many of my classmates fit my interests well. In reference to the first article, the author also says that team chemistry is important and that it doesn’t matter how talented a group is if they cannot work together, and I think the same can be said with my classmates and my interests. 

Subsequently, my second point is the results of the Lost at Sea activity. The idea of this activity was very fun, but once again, my teammates did not have ideal chemistry, and while we were able to reach agreements on where the items should be ranked in the list, the discussion fizzled into two people leading the activity, and while sometimes circumstances like this can be the fault of someone trying to be over dominant, the case here was some people not being as involved in the discussion, and things like this can also translate into poorer chemistry on the portfolio project regardless of whether I am working with people who I selected. 

Finally, my decision was not heavily influenced by the social media analysis activity, and I analyzed a lot of my classmates to see if anyone would fit with my interests for the project. I focused on Alec Miller’s social media, where he posts pictures of him and the cross-country team. While I have nothing against cross-country runners, this further exemplified that no one in the class shares the same specific interests that I want to focus on for the portfolio project. 

In conclusion, I will be working alone for the portfolio project because I do not feel like my interests are matched by anyone in class, and I think that having to have differentiating minds in my group will be counterproductive. Some personality traits that I have that make me like to work alone is that I do not like to have to educate anyone else on my interests while trying to get a project done, because this is simply unnecessary, and I would prefer to not have to manage trying to get everyone to be showing the same amounts of effort.