Is it more important to be able to work with a group of people on a team or to work independently? Use reasons and specific examples to support your answer.

Working as a team has always been encouraged by different cultures and societies. Even though some people might agree with working independently because of having less arguments and conflicts. I am sure others disagree. In my view, working as a team is a lot more advantageous for two major reasons.

First, people with specialized skills can accomplish projects quicker than one person. For example, in my lab at my university we work on developing new probes to detect reactive nitrogen and oxygen species, e.g. nitroxyl. In March 2014, I started a project under my advisor's supervison to detect endogeneous nitroxyl (HNO). Initially I was working independently on my project for about a year. Since I do not have a good synthesis background I was struggling with synthesizing large molecules like fluorescein. After about a year we decided to add one of our top undergraduates who was trained with syntheis. Kevin who joined my project helped me a lot with synthesis. He was able to successfully synthesize and purify my probe called, XF2. Meanwhile he was working on chemistry part of the project, I had enough time to focus on the biology part of it. As he was synthesizing XF2 and other probes, I was testing them on a lung cancer cell line called A549. At the end, we were able to finish the research project in about a year. Without team work we wouldn't be able to finish the project on time. Since we were able to acquire good result my advisor was able to write an NIH grant. Because of our team work, our lab is currently funded with about a million dollar fund to take our research to the next level.

Second, when people work as a team the chance of being discouraged by obstacles is far less. Different individuals have various level of energy. A day that one of team members is feeling down can be a great day for another person. Since people can get positive energy from each other, it is easier to bounce back to work and be motivated as a team. For instance, last summer I was preparing to take Foreign Pharmacy Equivalency Exam (FPGEE) which recently has become a lot harder than what it used to be. Because of different Facebook groups, I was lucky to study with a group of pharmacists from around the world. We had a group discussion on Skype and we talked about our strategies on how to study different areas that were mentioned on the National Board of Pharamcy's website. Since the study material were huge and we all worked and studied at the same time, we used to get stressed and not to know what to do? Whenever one of us were sad or demotivated to continue, we sent her/him a lot of motivational quotes and made many statements like "you can do" it and "don't give up". This helps us to continue. Finally, when results were ready all of us passed which was a great success for all of us.

In conclusion, working as a team is better not only does that give better and quicker results but keeps members motivated. I recommend everyone to work as a part of a team to succeed.