Describe us an event where you have demonstrated your leadership quality. Are you a team player?
I am very much a team player. I had many opportunities in school and universities to work in teams. In school it was easy because all my friends were from the cultural background where I am from. The scenario changed in the university as I had class mates from many different countries. In my senior year design project team, I had team members from Qatar, Pakistan, India, Syria, and Lebanon. Here I will specifically talk about some aspects of my leadership and team work ability based on my senior year design work experience.
I worked on project on building an electric vehicle. The team comprised of three electrical engineering students and three mechanical engineering students.
The key to make our team binding together was to respect each other’s differences. For example, each of us had different schedules. Convening a meeting was therefore too difficult, but as a convener, I had to find times when all of us could sit together. Sometimes I had to miss work in the library (and thus money) to arrange a meeting.
At the beginning, the project was going nowhere. The professors told us that we would have to build a car and neither the mechanical nor the electrical group knew where to start from. We selected no leader either. After a few frustrating weeks, I summoned all the members to actually determine our objectives and expectations. That helped us a lot. We narrowed down and finally decided that depending on the resources we had in our labs, the mechanical engineering students could only do the design of chassis, steering, and brake on paper and build a model chassis whereas their electrical engineering counterparts could design, simulate, build and test a prototype power train.
As the project went on, I found that one student was actually looking for a free ride. He never attended team meetings and never completed the tasks that we assigned him. I warned him several times. It didn’t work. I told the professor and he got dumped.
There was another student who simply wanted to get done with the senior year design project without getting deep into the project. He never bothered to complete the works assigned to him properly. For example, I gave him the whole control circuit diagram and asked him to build it in the Ultiboard, yet except for designing some foot prints, he could not do anything else. I later had to do the remaining footprint design, make the connections, split the board and do auto-routing. I attributed his failure to complete the tasks that I assigned him not to his intellectual ability (he was a decent student) but to laziness and inadequate effort regulation. I talked with him straight and tried to make him understand. As the project lead of the electrical engineering group, I kept the professor cognizant of this situation. The professor too warned him, but he never understood because he desperately wanted to get his degree and get out of the university. He was one of my good friends but in the peer evaluation at the end of the project, I had to be honest about his attitude. And I was.
I always tried to lead by example. For example, when we divided the writing task, I made sure that I kept the bigger portion of the assignment for me and I used to finish and show my assignment to them first before I demanded completed works from them. I have always believed that a leader should not lead only through commanding people, but also through setting examples for people. I tried to follow that.
I always believed in and respected my team member’s ability, especially those who were honest. My belief on them helped me to extract more from them than I expected.
There were times when the feeling in the camp was we will never be able to pull this off and we were scared that we may not have anything to demonstrate during the demo day. In those tough times, I however remained positive and asked my team members to remain positive too and told them just to keep working hard without thinking about what may happen in the demo day.
I am very much a team player. I had many opportunities in school and universities to work in teams. In school it was easy because all my friends were from the cultural background where I am from. The scenario changed in the university as I had class mates from many different countries. In my senior year design project team, I had team members from Qatar, Pakistan, India, Syria, and Lebanon. Here I will specifically talk about some aspects of my leadership and team work ability based on my senior year design work experience.
I worked on project on building an electric vehicle. The team comprised of three electrical engineering students and three mechanical engineering students.
The key to make our team binding together was to respect each other’s differences. For example, each of us had different schedules. Convening a meeting was therefore too difficult, but as a convener, I had to find times when all of us could sit together. Sometimes I had to miss work in the library (and thus money) to arrange a meeting.
At the beginning, the project was going nowhere. The professors told us that we would have to build a car and neither the mechanical nor the electrical group knew where to start from. We selected no leader either. After a few frustrating weeks, I summoned all the members to actually determine our objectives and expectations. That helped us a lot. We narrowed down and finally decided that depending on the resources we had in our labs, the mechanical engineering students could only do the design of chassis, steering, and brake on paper and build a model chassis whereas their electrical engineering counterparts could design, simulate, build and test a prototype power train.
As the project went on, I found that one student was actually looking for a free ride. He never attended team meetings and never completed the tasks that we assigned him. I warned him several times. It didn’t work. I told the professor and he got dumped.
There was another student who simply wanted to get done with the senior year design project without getting deep into the project. He never bothered to complete the works assigned to him properly. For example, I gave him the whole control circuit diagram and asked him to build it in the Ultiboard, yet except for designing some foot prints, he could not do anything else. I later had to do the remaining footprint design, make the connections, split the board and do auto-routing. I attributed his failure to complete the tasks that I assigned him not to his intellectual ability (he was a decent student) but to laziness and inadequate effort regulation. I talked with him straight and tried to make him understand. As the project lead of the electrical engineering group, I kept the professor cognizant of this situation. The professor too warned him, but he never understood because he desperately wanted to get his degree and get out of the university. He was one of my good friends but in the peer evaluation at the end of the project, I had to be honest about his attitude. And I was.
I always tried to lead by example. For example, when we divided the writing task, I made sure that I kept the bigger portion of the assignment for me and I used to finish and show my assignment to them first before I demanded completed works from them. I have always believed that a leader should not lead only through commanding people, but also through setting examples for people. I tried to follow that.
I always believed in and respected my team member’s ability, especially those who were honest. My belief on them helped me to extract more from them than I expected.
There were times when the feeling in the camp was we will never be able to pull this off and we were scared that we may not have anything to demonstrate during the demo day. In those tough times, I however remained positive and asked my team members to remain positive too and told them just to keep working hard without thinking about what may happen in the demo day.
Demo Day, Left: Jaber Al Marri, Right: Mahmudul Alam
Demo Day, Left: Zuhaib Abdin, Right: Mahmudul Alam
Electrical engineering product prototype: A four quadrant full bridge motor controller.
Mechanical engineering product prototype: A model chassis of formula hybrid car.
