ASSEMBLING YOUR CREW!

Pass me the wrench. Just one last bolt 🛠… And there you have it, my perfect teammate ✨! We all wish we could easily build the perfect teammate for the Conrad Challenge. Sadly, unless your project is building humans, we suggest looking for your teammates 🔍. On the flipside, this gives you the chance to work alongside close friends or even strangers who you will get close to over time! 

Now… where do you even find a team member who is the right match for you?

Finding teammates doesn’t have to be the long complicated process of mailing out applications worldwide 📬. Look into the communities you are part of already! Several Conrad teams form  within their own family, school, or community. The right partners could be just next to you!

Laasya and Laalitya Acharya, 2022 Conrad Finalists, did exactly this! The two sisters reflect on their experience of working together on “Ganges” and how it came into being!

I never worked with her [Laasya] on a project like this before. You've just grown up together [...] Working on a project with somebody who you're really close with also has its own set of challenges. So it's really important to set boundaries and almost treat this like a professional setting.

Laalitya Acharya, Conrad ‘22

The two sisters shared their advice for you, future Conraders, on where and who to look for! Laasya suggests looking within your own community along with being open to working with someone further away.

If you see someone on social media 📱 or you have mutual friends or something, you can contact them and be like ‘Hey, there's this challenge. Are you interested in joining it with me? Like we can set up zoom calls and kind of do this online.’ Or you can find people physically within your own community.

Laasya Acharya, Conrad ‘22

Laalitya opens up her biggest piece of advice that helped her out in not only the Conrad Challenge but also several other places in life.

Sometimes, the person who might be your best partner doesn't have to be your best friend. [...] You need somebody who you are a good partner 🤝 with. You're able to work seamlessly in terms of presenting or in terms of business protocols. [...] I didn't partner with some of my best friends, just because of the fact that sometimes the people who you're really good friends with, it's difficult to be able to work with them in a more professional setting. 

Laalitya Acharya, Conrad ‘22

Speaking of best friends- Sometimes, best friends have the best chemistry 🧪and form a great group together. Rhea Modey, Archita Khaire, Pratham Patel, Aditya Mehta, and Naveen Ramasam worked together on “Atmos” and qualified as 2022 Conrad Finalists too.

It was actually a group of very close friends 🤞. We knew each other pretty well. We knew what everyone else was capable of in terms of who had the most technical knowledge, who knew most about the business side, [and] things like that.

Pratham Patel, Conrad ‘22

Don’t let this stop you from working with people further away, though! If working with someone outside the country or your community interests you, it is definitely possible after overcoming a few barriers. The Conrad Challenge has had successful teams that were multinational or multi-schools 🌍; all of these teams had one thing in common, they had to work through the communication barriers whether it be time zones or how to meet. TaeJoo (Triston) Lee, a 2022 Pete Conrad Scholar and his “OXYPLY” teammates, William Kim and Michelle Yoo, met each other through their church. Their team members were each from different schools and from different parts of Korea. They were able to overcome the long distance and create the winning innovation in their category!