{"id":799,"date":"2018-05-11T14:25:58","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T14:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/?p=799"},"modified":"2018-06-18T12:06:03","modified_gmt":"2018-06-18T12:06:03","slug":"team-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/team-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Team work"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hello everyone!<\/p>\n

I hope you are doing well and enjoying the beautiful weather! I forgot how enjoyable it is to leave the house without creating formulas and making calculations involving degrees Celsius and number of coats. Green grass, birds, trees\u2026 Spring is in the air! While I looked down to avoid stepping on ice when I first came to MUN in the winter, I now look down and try to avoid killing a whole family of worms.<\/p>\n

In this blog post, I decided to write about something that was quite difficult for me when I first arrived here at MUN, and it all comes down to working in a team. I will explain my experience as a science graduate student, but I really believe this is applicable in various fields and stages of our lives. As an undergraduate student in Brazil, I had some amazing lab mates who finished their degrees as soon as I began my Master\u2019s studies. The government was (and still is) having a big crisis. The scholarships were (and are) being cut, and as a result, I spent approximately two years working alone in the lab. I had no one to share the glassware or instruments with and I had plenty of space to put an elephant in the lab if I wanted to. I could organize and plan experiments in my own time. You may think that this is heaven on earth, but like Uncle Ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. Besides the fact that working alone in a chemistry lab is unsafe, it is also quite boring and lonely. I didn\u2019t have to share equipment but I didn\u2019t have a friend to discuss and share ideas with either. Google and I spent a lot of time together trying to figure out what was going wrong or what should be done to make things right (and sometimes we were not successful).<\/p>\n

Used to this independence, I was very intimidated (to say the least) working in the research group of Dr. Fran Kerton and Dr. Chris Kozak here at MUN. When I first saw the lab, I went home crying with the biggest \u201cI can\u2019t do this – this is not going to happen\u201d feeling in the world. Instruments I\u2019ve never seen before in my whole life, different people, different names and abbreviations blowing up my mind (NMR is RMN in Portuguese \u2013 grrrrrrrr!), and different space (I could probably fit more than three elephants in our lab if I wanted). If you have never heard of the term \u201cImposter Syndrome\u201d you should look it up. I think everyone will feel this at some point in their lives. Fortunately, with a great group comes great help (let\u2019s not leave the responsibility behind), and I had some good friends always backing me up. In this whole process, I\u2019ve learned a few things that I think are important to share with you. I hope they can be helpful at some point.<\/p>\n

The first thing I learned from my team (and from Canada, in general) was to listen. Here in Canada, when you are speaking, you are speaking. And even if it\u2019s the most absurd thing in the world, people will let you finish what you have to say before agreeing or disagreeing with you. That is slightly different in Brazil, and was one of the main reasons I had the so-called cultural shock, that you don\u2019t realize you\u2019re having until you don\u2019t have it anymore. The truth is: you will mess things up. It doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re new and didn\u2019t know, or if you\u2019re having a really bad day, bad things will happen eventually. However, people are certainly going to talk to you and give you suggestions to avoid a mistake happening, and even if you don\u2019t like it or agree, you should listen. At the end of the day, they are just trying to help, because they care about you.<\/p>\n

The second thing that helped me was to realize that, in a team, my attitudes (even the smallest ones) will have a huge impact. When you\u2019re working alone, the only person affected by your choices is you, so it doesn\u2019t matter if you make bad ones. In a team, your entirety can\u2019t be underestimated: your attitudes impact the people around you, which will in turn impact the work environment. It\u2019s good to keep this butterfly effect in mind before letting problems affect your work and the way people are treated (easily said than done!). I personally try to shut myself down when I know I\u2019m not in a good mood, which is not always the best thing to do. Doing something that you really enjoy always recharges the energy!<\/p>\n

Last but not least, respect and kindness are essential. Graduate studies can be really stressful and frustrating sometimes, but having a team also means you have a new family that is there for you whenever you need. Also, hard work always pays off!<\/p>\n

I hope you have a wonderful beginning of the Spring semester! See you in the next blog,<\/p>\n

Ju<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello everyone! I hope you are doing well and enjoying the beautiful weather! I forgot how enjoyable it is to leave the house without creating formulas and making calculations involving degrees Celsius and number of coats. Green grass, birds, trees\u2026 Spring is in the air! While I looked down to avoid stepping on ice when … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-juliana-vidal","4":"post-799","6":"format-standard","7":"category-student-blog"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":834,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions\/834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}