Abhi's E-portfolio

The need of cooperation

When different branches exist within a given organization, cooperation is required to progress further. Before further building upon this statement, let's look at a theory called functionalism theory that explains the statement above in a much simpler way. This theory, taught in Sociology 101, proposed by Emil Durkheim, states that society is made up of interconnected parts that work together to maintain a state of balance and equilibrium for the whole. What this means is that different parts of a society depend on each other and must work together in order for the society to progress and strive for the greater good. Through my experience, I have learned that only through cooperation and interdependency we are able to achieve goals that we strive for in our daily life.

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This theory relates to community service very well. Community

service is done through cooperation of different organizations

in a society that leads to the ultimate goal of serving the

community. Service Saturday at USC is an example. One of

the sites that I signed up to volunteer was Salvation Army. On

that day, the USC Leadership and Service center, sponsor of

Service Saturdays, must stay in touch with the designated sites

to make sure that the conditions are optimal for the students to

volunteer. On the service day, our site leader was responsible

for communicating with us about the agenda for the day. After

arriving to the service site, the leader was responsible for

communicating with the USC Leadership and Service Center to confirm the arrival. While volunteering, communication was important between the volunteers and the Salvation Army employees to set goals on

what exactly needed to get done. After serving for the day, the leader must let the USC Leadership and Service staff know that the group is departing from the site. In case of any weather delay or interruption, communication must occur between the leader, site employees, and USC leadership and service staff to determine if Service Saturday can proceed or not. My point in providing all of this information is to pinpoint the cooperation that is required between the group leader, site employees, and USC Leadership and Service staff in order to maintain the flow of Service Saturday and bring equilibrium if there is a disorder. The main takeaway is that reaching a group goal requires a great deal of cooperation among individuals. Here, the group goal was to serve the community and for that to occur individuals had to communicate and cooperate to ensure that the goal is completed.

Another example would be being involved in Alpha Epsilon Delta (AED). AED is a pre-professional health honor society, on campus, that is involved in health related events. As a committee member of AED, we were dependent on each other to achieve a common goal of promoting AED.  As an AED ambassador, my goal was to recruit, promote, and spread awareness on what AED is about and how a student can  become part of it. For me to achieve this goal, I was dependent on our webmaster to make a creative pamphlet that would capture everyone’s attention immediately. After creating the flyers, I was responsible for promoting AED by handing out the flyers and explaining to students what AED has to offer. 

I was also dependent on him to make our website as aesthetic as possible. This way I can pull up the website and show prospective members information on who to contact and how to find relevant information pertaining to their questions. The point is, in order to promote AED to the finest, we as committee members were dependent on each other to achieve our common goal of advertising the club. This experience mirrors the within the classroom concept in that AED is not exactly society but indeed is an organization in which officers run the club through cooperation. This is similar to to the way different governmental bodies cooperate to run a society. This experience reinforced my understanding of functionalism theory in a way that now I’m able to see how important cooperation is between different entities to progress further.

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Another classic example is when I was responsible for coordinating a medical school trip. Three important tasks needed to be carried out by three different committee members in order for the trip to be successful. The first committee member was myself: I was responsible for contacting the medical school, and scheduling the day and time of the trip. Second committee member was responsible for advertising and promoting the trip to get as many members to sign up for the trip as possible. Third committee member was responsible for making travel arrangements for the members. Only through cooperation and being accountable for our part made this trip possible. If one committee member did not do their part properly then it could have led to miscommunication which could have impacted this trip significantly. The trip turned out to be very successful since we had a lot of members sign up for it. The main takeaway here is that for us to reach our goal of having a successful medical school trip, strong cooperation was required. Again, this example reinforces my understanding of functionalism theory in that different parts of society must work together to maintain a state of equilibrium (effective functioning of AED), and make progress towards goals (such as medical school trip).

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         The concept of functionalism can also be applied to my future profession. In order to provide quality patient-centered care, different departments within a hospital must cooperate together to make a patient’s stay as smooth as possible. By smooth I mean no distractions while being treated, no financial information being provided until the patient is competent enough to respond, and make all the resources available to the patient’s family. As a future physician, I can provide my part of the care to a patient, but taking care of a patient as a whole requires input from the rest of the healthcare staff. In the end, it is all about cooperation among hospital employees to provide the ultimate patient-centered care.

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