Table 1. Selected student responses to questions about cross-disciplinary teamwork from a voluntary exit survey.

Question	Examples of BIO Answer	Examples of CS Answer
What were the benefits of working with [partners from the other discipline]?	“Learning how differently we think from each other and how to communicate more effectively.”	“Having real, nontechnical customers helps you understand the nature of tasks outside the classroom: collaborating with nonsoftware people is unique, their needs are sometimes ambiguous, and there's a frightening but eye-opening reliance on them for domain-specific information. You also get to learn about an interesting field of study that you may have never considered working in before.”
	“Learned to communicate more effectively with people who don't have as [much] of a background in science as we do. We were more able to appreciate what CS people do, and it was fun to work together designing software.”
What were the challenges/drawbacks of working with [partners from the other discipline]?	“Really the same as the benefits…differences in background knowledge and communication.”	“They struggled tremendously to convey what they wanted the software to do. A lot of the time, also, they didn't have a clear idea of the data they were looking for. Because of that, we were often lost in our job as programmers.…when doing implementation, we usually had to guess their eventual needs or grill them for better details—their written specifications were never enough. This added extra time pressure too, because we'd spend a substantial portion of each lab attempting to work those things out…”
	“When…program functions were not working as expected, that was frustrating. It required patience for all to discuss as a group what was incorrect+brainstorm why.”
	“They did not know what we wanted, and we did not know what they could do.”
How did you overcome the challenges?	“Learning to speak up when something is not correct on either side of the team and trying to teach each other bits of background info.”	“We overcame the challenges by talking about the problem and teaching each other things that the other majors did not know…”
	“We had to discuss frequently and rewind our explanations until they made sense.”