Team Building Made Fun
WrUST OSA Student Chapter
International Leadership Workshop was first opportunity for our chapter to start an international cooperation. We invited our friends from Riga, Latvia OSA and SPIE Student Chapter to come to our city - Wrocław to exchange ideas, experiences and strengthen partnership between our chapters.
We began with a small breakfast and then we were all ready for the soft-skill training workshops. We walked on a rope, found out what are our strengths and weaknesses in a team, what our perfect city would look like and who can build the best spaghetti tower. Needless to say that the group of people who glued their spaghetti to the wall did have the highest structure, even though it was not self-supported. Sort of makes you wish that people could build huge towers gluing scraps of metal and concrete to the sky.
After a very insightful meeting and getting to know everyone (and ourselves as well), we went out for a friendly game of Laser Tag. If you have worked with lasers as well as ever played any first-person-shooter game, you know the thrill and excitement of getting to blast someone’s light-sensitive chest-piece with a huge laser-beam also known as the anti-tank gun. The guys relived their childhood fighting in the backyard, the women were thrilled to hold guns. All in all, everyone had a blast (pun intended). The evening ended with Centennial Celebration, where we presented OSA’s history as well as history of our chapter. It was another great mixer between our chapter members and the Latvia delegation.
The next day, former Chapter president Łukasz Gołacki shared his experienced in scientific work with “How to make real work in the project?” workshop.
Everything we learned during this workshop will affect our scientific careers and we strongly believe that this friendship will last for years. Our student chapter eventually visited the Latvia chapters three months after International Leadership Workshops where we went on a boat trip in order to work on team building. The next part will be held in 2017 where both of our chapters are organizing scientific conferences, we plan to attend conference in Riga, and also invite our friends to conference in Wroclaw. Thank you to OSA for providing us the Centennial Special Events Grant to make this exchange possible.
