Our trip to Breakout last night was something I have never experienced before. The objective of Breakout is to work with your team members to solve the clues and escape the room within an hour. We split into three groups of five people and all had to work together to escape. Each group was put into a different room with a unique theme, which allowed all of us to have a different experience.

In my group were Jordan, Hannah, Mike, Matt, and I. We were selected to escape the hostage room. We were guided down a hallway when we were suddenly stopped and were told to put blindfolds on. Since I was first in line I was selected to go into the room first. The employee directed me into a room and sat me on a bench, and then before I knew it I was getting handcuffed. The rest of my team members entered after me and we were soon all handcuffed to the same bench. We listened to a short video that explained our objective, which was to find the details behind the hijacked flight. Once the video ended we got to work, but first had to escape from the handcuffs. It took us about ten minutes to escape from the handcuffs, and then we finally started solving the clues. It was a lot harder to escape than I expected it to be, and we really had to think outside the box.

A few semesters ago I took a strength finder assessment and my results provided me with my five top strengths, which are discipline, consistency, adaptability, deliberative, and arranger. These strengths came into play during my time in the escape room. Deliberative came into play because everything was unpredictable while we were in the room. I had no idea what to expect and what to do first. Even though it was an unpredictable situation I identified all the possible options and continuously looked around the room looking for clues. Another skill that played a large role was adaptability. I was put into a new situation and had to learn how to adjust and adapt to working with new people while also being locked in a tiny room.

This was a great team building activity since we all had to work together and learn how to balance out each of our strengths. Between the five of us we had overlapping strengths, which included arranger, consistency, achiever, competition, and relator. The theme that was most common amongst all of us was arranger. This theme played the most significant role since it is all about trying to figure out the best way to get things done. We all wanted to escape and were constantly trying to find different alternatives to solve the clues. In the beginning we were trying to focus on too many clues, which was not getting us very far. We soon realized that we needed to work together on one clue at a time, which ended up being much more efficient since we were actually getting things done and solving the clues. Unfortunately, we did not escape within the one-hour time frame, but did come very close with only having two more clues left to solve.

Overall, I had a great experience and would love to go back and do it again sometime soon. I would be interested in trying a new room and working with different people to learn and develop new skills when working in teams.