Academic Team Reflection

This is something that I have been dreading: writing the final reflection for Academic Team. This activity has really been a unique experience. I have never done anything remotely like it before, unless you count class Jeopardy games back in middle school. Not only was I a novice in the activity, but the others students on the team with me were a group of kids I was almost entirely unfamiliar with. For whatever reason, I hadn't had the chance to connect with any of them in my two years at Sturgis, so I was a bit nervous as to whether or not I would be welcome on the team. This along with the fact that I arrived late in the year to the group really had me worried.

My goals were to simply exercise my unique prowess for geography and to feel welcome in an unfamiliar environment. After nearly six months of training with the team and bonding over the impossible questions thrown at us in the Knowledge Master Open, I believe that I have achieved these goals. Needless to say there were some rough spots along the way where I didn't feel very confident or I was having disagreements with other members of the team, but as a whole the experience was immensely rewarding.

This activity met six of the eight learning outcomes laid out by the CAS gods. The first two met, of course, were learning outcomes two and eight. By joining the Academic Team, I was undertaking a new challenge because I had begun participating in something entirely out of my comfort zone. I knew that I would be fantastic in answering questions about geography, but the experience was a challenge in the sense that I was arriving at a foreign social environment with no prior knowledge of how an academic team might work. This was obviously a bit intimidating at first, but I quickly developed new skills in branching out to the others on my team by connecting over some of the ridiculous questions we were asked in a jovial manner. I seemed to have overcome my social barrier and inexperience and felt welcome in the team.

Once these two learning outcomes were developed, learning outcomes one, four, and seven became very prominent. As I learned the infrastructure of the Academic Team and its basic system of functioning, I became more confident in my geographic trivia ability but more worried about my relative dearth of other knowledge. I was forced to recognize this weakness and work to develop skills in science, math, and literature. I did do some extra reading and studying, but I became more comfortable with these area by creating a symbiotic learning relationship with the rest of my teammates with different expertises. This collaboration was fantastic, and with all of our minds working together to understand a question and solve a problem, we did better point-wise and actually seemed to understand the material. Often times there were disagreements, which is not uncommon in the team atmosphere. I clashed with Marliee, who seemed to think that I was an arrogant know-it-all. Therefore, I consulted myself with past actions and I made sure in the future to do nothing more than silently work with the team and answer the question. I knew it would be best to eliminate politics from something as lighthearted as Academic Team.

Finally, Academic Team met learning outcome five. I was entirely committed to this activity. I attended nearly all of the meetings and was dedicated to the amelioration of the team. I persevered through times of turbulence in group unity. I only missed one competition due to conflicting academic priorities. So I am proud that not only did I stay so committed to an activity that at first seemed random and intimidating, but I was also very successful as a member.