Efficiency.

At university (lazier than getting a job) I 'studied' Physics with Astrophysics. There are good reasons why that was a lazy choice, but I won't get into them now. One of the main areas of the course we got marked on was project work, which was great. I think it counted for about 30% of the final grade in the end. One of our projects involved using the University Observatory to take some measurements on a subject of our choosing (from a list of options).

My group was an exceptional group of like minded individuals. Two of us had, the year before, been the most efficient lab partnership in history, completing our "all day" lab assignments that were scheduled from 11am to 6pm in time for a late lunchtime beer almost every week. If we were into very lame rhyming our motto would have been "get the data, write up later" or even sometimes "borrow a member of the year above's lab book for hints". So, when the time came for the Observatory project we had one goal, get out in time for last orders (which back in those days was 10:50pm). Obviously being a telescope based project, we had to start when it got dark so time was limited.

We knew what we had to do, we found out how the telescope worked in advance. Asked previous groups who'd already been for tips on set-up, worked out what measurements we needed to take and we were ready to rock. This was done in the Physics tea room or in the pub of course.

When we got to the observatory our supervisor was obviously thinking he was in for a long night. We were the slackers who left labs early and never went to tutorials after all, and there were only three of us when groups were normally 4 people. I still remember now the slightly stunned look that remained on his face all night as we swung into action.

There was quite a lot of set up and calibration that had to be done before we could take any measurements and this required 2 people I think, 1 in the telescope room and 1 working the computer. So we split our team very sensibly, 1 with the telescope, 1 with the computer, 1 making everyone a nice cup of tea. Once we were set up and had our hot beverages (and biscuits) sorted out we carried on with our tasks. Teammate 1 read out the co-ordinates for the next star, teammate 2 used the computer to move the 'scope, teammmate 3 recorded the results whilst teammate 1 was looking up the next star. We finished all the required measurements and took quite a few extra because we had time. I know this breaks the fundamental rule of not exceeding expectations, but it would have been rude to leave so early. Once we had that data we got packed up and, of course, got to the pub by closing time.

In the end I got a decent degree because of the quality of my project work... I missed too many lectures and failed too many exams to have passed on that alone. This kind of thing was perfect training for the world of work.