Undergraduate /
Common App Essay; 'And there was the sergeant, organizing and motivating' [3]
It was the D Day, the first operation to free France and the World on the Second World War. Nowadays, the closer that a young man likes me could be of this level of action is on a videogame console. However, to know how the sergeant felt, not about the war, but actually with the pressure and the responsibility that
represent being the leader of a team and have the beginning of the whole project over his shoulders, is not so far to my understanding and reality. The company where I worked once doing a simple job of counting cars, called me for a new job as a supervisor in a new traffic study
. My tasks were
to find some people to do the counting cars job and be responsible for their actions, control their punctuality, their performance and get the job done. I wasn't about to "bring about the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe" as President Eisenhower
had said on his speech to those frontline troops, but I really felt the anxiety and
the responsibility of doing a good job in order to
achieve the success of the whole project. If my team failed gathering that data, the rest of the project would be wrong,
It was a totally new experience for me; I was still a teenager
who has just graduated from high school, but even when it looks like too much for me, my soul claims for a challenge like that, and also,
the confidence that the company has to call me was enough courage doze to accept it.
( I don't quite understand this sentence)I had a week to reunite the team,
studying the intersection to place the people and organize the schedule. I set two periods for the four days that we have to gather data, two business days and a weekend; in the morning from 6:30 to 10:30, and in the afternoon from 16:00 to 19:30, this was in order to have results from the peak hours.
(what do you mean?)Also the rendezvous hour was fifteen minutes before each period to assign positions and give them their
uniforms, the counters and forms to annotate their results. Having this on mind, the real challenge was to get ten persons eager to work, with a high commitment with the job, punctual, responsible and with enough available time. There wasn't a lot of people available; some of my closer friends, high school classmates and some known people were the only ones
who accepted the offer.
They were a varied group, between them they were strangers, other with personal differences, but for me they were my team and now they have a common objective. (you may want to rearrange this sentence)
And even when some positions were far from each other, I was looking for unity in order to make them realize that they have to care about each other and that they have a great responsibility with the truthfulness of the data.
There was Thursday, the very first day; the trip from my home to the city
was long, about two hours with traffic, but by leaving home very early in the morning, at five o'clock, I was able to be on the rendezvous point ten minutes
early to organize everything. To ensure that everyone will be there, I started to call them at five o'clock; some were just leaving, waking up or having breakfast. I knew that the first day would be a diagnosis day; troubles
would appear and they should be improved. It started
well enough, people was on time, except for just one girl that I had to substitute her for a few minutes and then do what I was supposed to do since the beginning, supervise. I thought that I would be over them every minute, trying to keep the whole thing working perfectly, from one side to other, but instead of that I found a disciplined team, that were all the time working, alert and in their positions; I felt that there was no necessity to supervise at all, instead of my first thought I was rewarding them all the time, with snacks and coffee during the cold nights. I tried to be with each person enough time to understand how
his/her position worked and how
I could make it more efficient and comfortable for
him, if
he needed more counters, more paper, or any change in the forms I tried to make that data gathering a nice experience. The day was over and my task was to receive their forms and equipment, revise their data, whether
it was legible or not, and make the corresponding
correction, always trying to make and ordered and effective process because they were all tired and eager to go home, but that data couldn't be misleading.
The rest of the days were similar, the people were always on time and they followed orders without complain like wear the uniform or go to a specific position. With the time I realized that I was not just in charge of the data, I was in charge of them, their health and their moral, when they were depressed, tired or bored, I was there. In the end of the day it was my duty to drive them
safely to their homes, I stayed until everyone were on their transports to home; and then make sure that they were ok to be on time for the next day.
I was not part of an event like the D Day, but I know that is just matter of dimension. This supervisor job was very easy, and sometimes it turned a little bit bored because it lacks of action, but I had understand that it was not easy because of the nature of the work, it was easy because since the very beginning I tried to do my best, if the team that I had had to gather were untruthful people because I just want to find ten persons instead of looking who are the right ones for the job, my supervisor work would had become on a headache; instead of rewarding my team I would had been yelling my personnel all the time. If I had never taken that cautions of calling the people as a reminder, or preparing the equipment the night before and before the arrival of the team, or receiving it in order at the end of the day, I'm sure that this job would have become a huge challenge, with lots of troubles to fix, and with a total lack of commitment because the leader didn't take it seriously, and later the whole project would become a mess. As the sergeant, all that cautions, organization, confidence on his troop and commitment with the project, gave him enough courage to enter the battlefield and give his best effort.
Great idea about team work and responsibility. However, the essay seems a bit disorganized. You should also pay attention to the verb tense and try to make the essay clearer and more concise.
Good luck!