Learning How to Lead: The Value of Working as a Team

TRANSCRIPT

[Announcer] I have in my hand the third place envelope.

Chloe Rubinowicz (EE, M.S. ’23): You hear third place, you hear second place, and you're so nervous because there's three other teams. Are you gonna place first? Or are you gonna go home with nothing? And sitting there in that moment it was—it was crazy.

I've done team projects, but I've never done a global competition. The concept was helping the UN achieve their goal of Net Zero carbon by 2050. Our main purpose is to provide carbon emissions monitoring with a comprehensive solution to achieve carbon neutrality.

I was actually team lead in the competition, so you know having to organize things, having to motivate people when you're down—it gave me a lot of valuable team-working experience.

And just like team projects, athletics kind of does the same thing you know, because you have
to learn how to lead, you have to learn how to work with a team and that's been valuable basketball probably a majority of my time, but I think it actually provides a stability and a support network for me that I couldn't find elsewhere.

We have some of the most amazing opportunities here.

IEEE is Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. I was president and we started doing what we call the IEEE speaker series—we were bringing in faculty, we were bringing in companies to speak to students. This was giving people internship opportunities 
job prep opportunities, and it was so amazing to be a part of and to run.

[Announcer] And the winner is Illinois Institute of Technology! Congratulations again to Illinois Institute of Technology—first place in the Keysight Innovation Challenge 2022.

We won, and it was such an amazing feeling. The competition has done actually a lot for my career plans because Keysight offered me a full-time job opportunity after graduation,
and my whole team got opportunities to interview with Keysight after the competition, so we all got that chance—I just took it.

If someone was wondering if they should come to Illinois Tech, I would say just do it. It's a smaller school, but that's part of what makes it so great. We have the most amazing scholarship support, academics, athletics. You will come to know this as your home.