Wharton Essay ***********
One of my most significant achievements that profoundly impacted me was building my family house in my hometown, Pingnan, China.
In 1991, to fulfill our parents’ dream of owning a home, my siblings and I decided to build a house for my parents. This is the biggest project I have ever encountered. Due to our limited financial resources, we had to recruit as much free help (volunteers) as possible. Since the majority of the volunteers were my high-school friends, most of the construction work was conducted during summer and spring breaks when they were back from college. It took us three years (1991, 1992 and 1993) to build the house, a four-floor (about 70 square meters or 750 square feet per floor) brick and concrete house in rural China.
Even though I was just twenty years old, as a man, I was expected to be accountable for big projects in the family. As one of the decision makers, I was involved in every event from project initiation to the final celebration banquet: choosing and bidding for land, designing the layout, budgeting, hiring construction contractors, recruiting volunteers, managing logistics, and working hard in the actual construction. Before this project, I was a leader among my friends, but I doubted about my ability to lead such a huge, real-world project. During these three years, I sharpened and demonstrated my leadership and teamwork skills and gained confidence that I could be a great leader and team player under any circumstance.
Because of the great friendships that I had with my high-school friends, I took the challenging task of recruiting them and maintaining their enthusiasm. As we all know, recruiting volunteers can be much more difficult than recruiting paid workers since the latter has more obvious motivation factors. This task required me to develop strong persuasion and motivation skills. When I needed help to dig the house foundation, I visited my friends’ houses and tried to persuade each of them to join. I also motivated my three best friends to help me motivate and encourage others by creating a sense of teamwork. To maintain their enthusiasm, I assured each friend that his skills were critical to the job he was doing and communicated regularly with each one to ensure that he was content with his role. The work was often boring and tedious, but I led my friends by being a hard worker myself while finding ways to make our work fun. To keep up team morale, we divided into small groups and held competitions; we teased and challenged each other among different groups; we created team gestures and signals to inspire a cohesive spirit. As the leader, I also listened to their suggestions and discovered that when I listened and took their ideas seriously, they would return to me with more good ideas and have more respect for my leadership.
I learned to be a team player not only with my friends, but also with my family. We usually discussed and planned the work when I returned home from college for breaks. During the project, we planned for next day’s progress every night after work. In this huge project, the board of directors, namely my parents, my older sisters and brother-in-law, and me, certainly didn’t agree on every item. There were lots of considerations that we needed to discuss and resolve-from big issues like the house layout and budgeting to small issues like the window color and whom to invite to the celebration banquet. Through those discussions, I learned how to foster an open environment for free discussion, how to resolve conflicts, and how to compromise individual ideas for the best of the team.
One confrontation that occurred was between my sister and me over the banquet gift. It is tradition in my hometown that the host presents a gift for each guest after a celebration banquet. My sister wanted to buy a less expensive one because we faced financial limitations. I insisted that the house was finally finished and we should buy a more expensive gift to express our gratitude. After a lot of discussion, I was persuaded that the financial considerations were much more important and I accepted my sister’s proposal.
Building my parents’ house changed my view of the world. I came to realize that the world was composed of static objects (XXXX) and dynamic beings (XXXXX). Every project we work on requires managing XXXXX or dealing with XXXX, and most of the time, both. For XXXX, we use science and engineering skills to manage and solve problems. For XXXX, these same management techniques may not be the best. I realized that to deal with XXXX, leadership and motivation move a project along. This led to my management philosophy: XXXXXXXX. In this inter-dependent world, what an individual can achieve on his own is very limited; only through co-operation (or even compromise) and team effort can we achieve the best of our potential. After we won the bid on the house lot, the first thing I did was to try to remove the mud by myself. I was shocked to see how little work I could achieve on my own and was frightened by the huge amount of work needed just for the foundation. Only through the team efforts of my family and friends could this enormous project be accomplished.
Building the house also taught me that life is not just a process of hard work; it is also a chance to enjoy. I valued this experience not only because of what I achieved and learned, but also because of the great memories of my loving family and strong friendships, especially the joy after we conquered one challenge after another. I will never forget the hectic happiness after we used dynamite to successfully remove the unexpected underground rock when we were preparing the house foundation. From then on, every time I encounter any hardship, I start looking for the optimistic side and try to enjoy the fun side of hard working
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