Teamwork Goes a Long Way

by Chethana Gallage Dona

Having to research about how the world works, this year, the theme we chose for the Honors in Action Project was ‘War and Peace’. This project provided us the opportunity to look deeply into global issues, and study them from different perspectives. Being a person who wasn’t exposed to certain global issues, this made me discover a whole other level of knowledge that existed beyond Science, the only stream I used to focus on prior to this project. By researching scholarly articles, reading books and summarizing them, I improved my written and analysis skills tremendously. Therefore, more than the content of the project itself, the most important aspect for me was the process; researching, deciding, compiling, organizing and presenting my work.

Having a large team consisting of nine officers along with members, I imagined that we would have to deal with a lot of problems while making decisions. However, since we provided everyone with the opportunity to share their viewpoints and then make a final decision based on the interest of the majority, it was always a peaceful and efficient process. This process of decision making isn’t only applicable to the HIA project. It can be used everywhere else we make decisions and therefore, this I consider as one of the valuable lessons I learned during the HIA project.

Apart from that, my favorite part of the project was distributing tasks, making goals, setting goals and deadlines and accomplishing them. When we started the project, one of our first tasks were to find articles that would help us narrow down our chosen theme. During this, we all were assigned with various sources such as newspapers, journals and books and we worked as a team to search for topics that we could base our research on. Having the ability to search through all these sources led us to our current topic, that is, how does the portrayal of religion in the media affect conflicts or build peace globally?

Even though this seemed to be a recurring topic in the news, we found that most of the information available in newspapers and other media outlets were biased towards certain religions and not towards others. This is when we decided to interview journalists, the individuals who present these stories to the public and hear their perspective on this topic. As it was the summer, most professionals were hard to get in touch with and we were left to wonder whether we might be able to interview any journalist at all. However, we were persistent and continued reaching out to journalists through our own network of people. Despite being a challenging task at first, our persistence landed us with an opportunity to interview Mr. Scott Anderson, a journalist/filmmaker at the New York Times and Mr. Ken Rosato, a journalist from ABC News. These rare opportunities would not have been possible if we weren’t organized and worked together as a team.

The Honors in Action project helped me further understand the importance of establishing connections, setting goals and accomplishing them by given deadlines and most importantly it helped me understand the value of teamwork. Even after moving on from this group in future, I would still be able to apply the lessons I learned from the project and my team to in all future endeavors and gain great satisfaction looking back at the feats we’ve accomplished together.