It’s nearing the end of my first year at Pepperdine, and I must say that one of the best decisions I made early on was finding a group of like-minded, hardworking individuals that I worked well with. From our very first Organizational Behavior (OB) class till now, we’ve worked in the same 4-person team every chance we got. At Pepperdine, not everyone is on the same track – they understand that “life happens” and people need to scale back or take a break every now and again – so not everyone is as fortunate to end up in the same classes with the same people every trimester.
But if you find yourself on a good team, I recommend that you try to stick with that same group as much as possible. You’ll find out soon enough that nearly every class requires some sort of teamwork, and there is usually at least one presentation involved (fun stuff huh?). 
Even though we’re not all on exactly the same track, we try to take at least one of the two classes per trimester together. Over the course of the year, I’ve found that we’re starting to have an innate understanding of each others strengths and weaknesses. We’re no longer afraid to speak up and offer constructive criticism to one another… and best of all, my classmates have now become my dear friends.
Some may disagree with me. Some might prefer to branch out and explore various working styles, and that’s okay too. I’m just sharing my personal experiences since this is my post and all. :p But whatever you do, one collaboration tool I highly recommend that my team has been using is DropBox. It is an easy way to quickly upload any file from your computer and share it with whoever you give permissions to. For example, my team will share a Powerpoint presentation, and any team member can access that file, make changes, and save – the saved changes will then translate on every single computer with that same synced, shared folder. Has anyone else tried DropBox?
Other Collaboration Tools of Interest:
- Google Docs – you’ll need a gmail account to really take advantage of these features, but they’re great.
- Elluminate (tried this, but it didn’t work for us – we found it difficult and confusing to use, sorry Pepperdine) – its an online conferencing tool and could be useful when trying to meet in-person is too unrealistic.
- Skype – 4-way voice-conferencing. Makes sense to me.
- Emails & In-person meetings – it’s hard to rule out tried and true tactics.
The biggest challenge we faced as a team was finding the TIME to meet because most of us have classes on weekday nights, and if you’re not in the same class, its likely that you have classes on different nights. Imagine trying to meet when some people have classes on Mondays and Tuesdays while others have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Don’t forget about scheduling in a life. Just some food for thought.
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