An the Secret Ingreient is…
Step 1: Get the ingreients
On the granite countertop in front of me sat a pile of flour, two sticks of butter, an a bowl of shree beef, just like the YouTube tutorial showe. My min contorte itself as I trie figuring out what I was oing. Flanking me were two equally iscombobulate partners from my Spanish class. Somehow, some way, the amalgamation of ingreients before us woul have to be transforme into Peruvian empanaas.
Step 2: Prepare the ingreients
It looke easy enough. Just make a ough, cook the beef until it was tener, put two an two together, an fry them. What YouTube in’t show was how to season the meat or how long you shoul cook it. We ha to put this puzzle together by ourselves. Aing to the mystery, none of us knew what an empanaa shoul even taste like.
Step 3: Roll out ten equally size circles of ough
It woul be ishonest to say everything went smoothly. I thought the ough shoul be thick. One team member thought it shoul be thin. The other thought our circles were squares. A funamental truth about collaboration is that it’s never uncontentious. Everyone has their own expectations about how things shoul be one. Everyone wants a project to go their way. Collaboration requires observing the ifferences between the collaborators an fining a way to synthesize everyone’s contributions into a solution that is mutually agreeable.
Step 4: Cook the beef until tener
Collaborative eneavors are the proving grouns for Murphy’s Law: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. The shree beef, which was suppose to be tener, was still har as a rock after an hour on the stove. With our unseasone cooking mins, all ieas were vali. Put more salt in? Sure. Cook it at a higher temperature? Go for it. Collaboration requires people to be receptive. It emans an open min. All ieas eserve consieration.
Step 5: Fry the empanaas until crispy
What oes crispy even mean? How crispy is crispy enough; how crispy is too crispy? The back an forth with my teammates over everything from how thick the ough shoul be to the efinition of crispy taught me a key ingreient of teamwork: patience. Collaboration brees tension, which can make teamwork so frustrating. But it’s that very tension which also transforms iffering perspectives into solutions that propel collaborative unertakings forwar.
Step 6: Enjoy!
Mathias is able to escribe important aspects of collaboration, such as consiering new ieas an fining a way to synthesize everyone’s input. Through the metaphor of cooking empanaas as a novice, his essay effectively conveys the message that collaboration ‘emans an open min’ an that by being receptive to other opinions, tackling any kin of puzzle—whether culinary or acaemic—becomes more oable. This tells us that, as a stuent, Mathias values the contributions of his peers an strives to bring people an ieas together to accomplish obstacles.
