CPW Blog: Presentations & Team Breakfasts

Trafton B.

March 5, 2011 - 5:00 PM

I just realized it's been a while since I last updated you all on Team Solid Waste, and a lot's happened since our tour of Short Mountain Landfill. I tell about you about the details of my memo on the City of Sacramento's construction and demolition (C&D) debris recycling ordinances, but I feel like you might not find that as interesting as I do. I guess it'd be more fun to explain our latest and greatest achievement that came yesterday.

It was presentation week in CPW. Our team presented yesterday morning, and, I don't want to brag about anything, but we nailed it. I'm telling you, our presentation was awesome! We still have a lot of time left together and another term's worth of work left to finish, but I think it's safe to say that I've never worked with a more fun, smart, diligent, creative, and all-around more awesome group of people than my CPW team. I don't think I've ever worked so hard yet had so much fun on any group projects. It's awesome. As I mentioned to my project manager early this week, we're just beginning to ‘click' as a group. You can almost feel the dynamics of the team falling seamlessly into place. We're picking up speed at just the right time, and yesterday's presentation was a great example.

Our presentation yesterday was more or less a progress report on our term's work throughout the quarter. We spoke about our work so far this term, site visits to local construction sites, the landfill, materials receiving facility, and researching C&D ordinances from different municipalities across the nation, etc. Then gave a little incite into our research about what elements make for a good C&D ordinances. (That was my part of the presentation.) Finally, we previewed some of the work we'll be doing in the spring term, like conducting focus groups with local contractors and city staff members around Eugene.

We have a lot of positive momentum going into next term. It's actually almost a shame that we have a week off for spring break, but it should be too much of a hindrance. I mean, you can never really say spring break is a bad thing, right?

We also seem to have started a new tradition, team breakfast at Studio One Café. Well, today wasn't a complete team breakfast because Monique wasn't there, but I'm sure we'll have another one in the near future. At the beginning of the quarter, when we were writing up our team charter, we made the agreement that we'd meet outside of CPW at least once a month to just hang out, get to know each other, and talk to each other about something other than CPW. I'm proud to say that we've followed this rule very intently. Yesterday we met for breakfast. A few Fridays we went out for drinks after a meeting with our client at the City of Eugene. Like I said, we're having fun.

Next week we have some more work to do our memos and we'll put together a little presentation for our client during finals week. We also have our CPW oral final at the end of next week. That shouldn't be too much hassle, though. It will probably be helpful for us to speak about our project with someone that hasn't been working on it, so I'm not too worried. One thing I'm really impressed with about our team dynamics is how well we know the different parts of our project. We even know a lot about what one another is working on. My favorite part about our presentation yesterday was actually the quick debrief we had afterwards when I realized that each one of us could have presented every one else's part of that presentation and it would have been just as good. That's the kind of this that brings a smile to everyone's faces.