• Question: are you a team player or do you work alone

    Asked by liamsevans71 to Andrew, Hina, Ian, Kathryn, Leah-Nani, Xu on 11 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Leah-Nani Alconcel

      Leah-Nani Alconcel answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      Definitely a team player. My lab would not function if we weren’t all quite good at working together. It’s a small team and most of us have been there for more than a decade.

    • Photo: Kathryn Burrows

      Kathryn Burrows answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      I work quite independently but I work as part of several different teams. It tends to be we all go off and work on our own but being part of a team is very important and when you come back together and discuss your ideas you see things differently and catch problems or see more creative solutions.

    • Photo: Ian Jones

      Ian Jones answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      Engineering is ALL about being a team player. You can’t possibly be good at everything. Everyone has their own strengths and skills. Going to work and splitting up difficult tasks between amazing colleagues is really fantastic. So don’t be scared about not being good enough…. just find a great team!

    • Photo: Andrew Margetts-Kelly

      Andrew Margetts-Kelly answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      Definitely both.
      —————————–
      Solving little problems:
      As an engineer you need to be able to take the initiative and figure things out. On a daily basis I need to design and work on your own. I need to research things I don’t already understand to figure it out.
      Even then there will be times I need t go and ask someone to help.
      —————————–
      Solving big problems:
      At the same time you also need to work in small teams, big groups of teams even; with many people specialised in fields different from your own. When you are building a spacecraft for example there is a huge amount of work to do. It’s not just case of you cannot possibly be expert in everything, there is too much work for one person to do on their own.
      For example a recent set of satellites we built at SSTL cost over 340 person years of labour each. So our constellation of 3 satellites would take one person 1000 years to build them.

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