Lessons Learned

Over the weekend, despite not winning in my last year in the competition, I did learn valuable lessons regarding management. Yes, while managing the Structural Design department during the year, I was questioned regarding my decisions (ahem, Allan HAHA), but experience usually justified my decisions. The fact that I had been around before to see similar decisions contribute to a winning proposal allowed me to convince my department to follow my judgment.

This weekend was entirely different. Last year, when the Romanian team was with Durango High School, the experience card worked. Durango has been in the ISSDC for many years, and is a powerhouse just like the Whitney team. Last year, it was the Romanian team's first year, which caused them to often submit to Durango, despite their arrogance. Additionally, there were only guys on the Romanian team. This year, some of the girls were complete bitches, and contributed to reducing the quality of the work seen in the Operations and Human Factors departments. Despite having 14 years of experience in the competition, my team's experience card was completely thrown out the window when dealing with the Romanian team.

At least I felt I did as much as I could do. Because the majority of the three-team company was Romanian, they voted one of their own members, Mircea, as the company president. Yes, I would've liked to be president, but I do admit he was really chill, and he allowed to make many of my decisions on my own. Therefore, regarding my own decisions, I didn't really have anyone to answer to, so I was essentially the company president, just not in name. Yet, this shows that the task at hand, to manage the Romanian team members (many of them were voted department directors just through majority), was entirely too large to be accomplished.

There were lessons learned with my own team members as well, not just with me. With the exception of the Automations department, every department was under control by the Romanian team. This competition showed that they were eager to hog the power, but at 4am, with only 3.5 hours left until deadline, it became clear that they needed my team's experience and training to bail them out. Guys, I hope you are reading this; your talents are there, but you do need to be more assertive. Otherwise, other incapable people are going to walk all over you.

It is said that you learn more from your losses than your victories. I had hoped that not qualifying for the finals last year would provide enough lessons, but apparently I was wrong. I hope that next year, my team can come out with this year's undoing and use it to pull out a win. At the same time, don't repeat what the Romanian team did and completely shut out the other teams; retain a sense of openness, but also establish a sense of authority. Unless you're teaming up with Durango next year, there is no one out else there with the experience to efficiently put together a proposal in a short amount of time.

Through this competition, I have learned to deal with people who have no regard for my advantages, whether that be experience or prior training. Perhaps this will serve to be a good topic for some application essay in the future, because this weekend really did have life lessons.