Speaker 1: One of our first activities, right after orientation, was the Global Mobile Challenge, and it was actually the first time that we met our learning teams. And I remember walking into the room, and all of us kind of checking each other out and seeing, like, okay, who are these, who is this group of eight people we're going to be working with for the rest of the year?

Speaker 2: SOM designs the program so that you are divided into groups of teams, starting from eight or nine people. And you are very close with these team members, you are doing projects together, you are preparing homeworks together, and you have a chance to put your ideas together and bring the best out of this group here. Right upon arrival, we started our Managing Groups and Teams course.

Speaker 3: We were forced in a very condensed window to do this intensive four-to-five-day-long course where we were doing all team-based exercises, and so it forced us to sort of work with each other in a way that you might not normally have to in a traditional work environment.

Speaker 4: We were put in situations where they were trying to deliberately push our buttons, create some conflict, because that's going to happen no matter what you're doing in any setting, and it's really how you resolve it that matters. Managing Groups and Teams, first and foremost, was like a warm-up for your team, and getting used to that before they put us into the first-year core courses in Fall 1.

Speaker 5: Everyone has a different background, so everything from nonprofit to tech to financial services to business analytics, military.

Speaker 1: On my learning team of four, I'm actually both the only woman and the only American-born student. When we have group assignments, that means we can attack problems together much more effectively than we would on our own, understand different approaches to the same problem, sometimes an approach that might work better than the way that you were initially going to approach a problem by yourself.

Speaker 6: While doing homework and assignments, we can actually provide lots of very different perspectives about the same situations, especially those related to some cultural background. We can help each other to understand the situation better.

Speaker 5: First it was very, I'm good at the finances, you're good with the statistics, you do this, I'll do that. After about maybe three or four weeks of doing that, I think we realized that what we're here at business school for is to learn from each other. And so rather than just taking what we're good at and working on that, how can we help our classmates and help our small learning team members get better at things that they're not good at.

Speaker 7: It doesn't have to be only at the deliverable, it can also be how to create a better environment for everyone in order to keep evolving. Because once you start working with people and you create this environment of not competitiveness, but like relationship and solidarity, it works way better.

Speaker 4: Many of these people have become my closest friends here and I think we, even though we've broken down now into these two sub-teams, we still do group dinners as a whole with the full team. I think when we're able, we still like to discuss projects together and those are the people that you kind of met first and I think a lot of those relationships stick with you.

Speaker 8: When we leave SOM, we're going to be working in groups and I guess a lot of the MBA education traditionally has been focusing on personal development, but you really do need to have those interpersonal skills. They're absolutely crucial. The one thing that I've learned while working at Yale SOM is that I'm worth so much more when I'm in a strong team. I'm worth so much more.