Group Project Madness: Part 3

The Group Project was one of the hardest and most stressful times of my 2^nd year of University.

It was a very invaluable experience to be had and I had learned a lot of things regarding many different areas.

I wanted to take the group project as positively as I can, but there were so many factors that kept on knocking down my positive attitude as well as much motivation.

However, no matter how grim the group project went, I would try as hard as I can to stay working and motivated. A few of the group members would help with keeping me optimistic and one particular member would often knock it down to negativity (for many reasons I won't get into).

I believe that it's important to stay optimistic to keep the team morale high and that being pessimistic does nothing but hinder the workflow of the group.

One of the main concerns I tried to push across within the group was having group sessions where we would work with each other in the labs to communicate, learn and to crit each other on our work in person. Not many people liked this idea as they preferred to work in the comforts of their own home, or because of travelling issues.

Me when I get put onto the answering machine

Another main concern of my mine throughout the entire project would be communication in general. The communication in our group was very poor and as relations soured within members of the group, communication would get even worse.

For the most part, I was one of the only people chasing up members, trying to get them to reply to certain messages of the group page.

Because many of our members didn’t like to meet up for group sessions, I suggested an idea that we could all use Google Hangouts. This would allow us to have group video chats as well as work and show progress on the screen for crits, art directing and overall help.

Again this idea never took off because a lot of people didn’t bother to reply with their input into the matter.

I feel that most of our members had a lack of enthusiasm and commitment to the project. The Easter break would be a major standstill for communication, as it was a nightmare to get members to meet up. After the first few weeks of the project, we would never have a full group meeting until towards the end of the group, where it was too late.

I feel that if we had much better management at the start of the project, many people would have a better understanding of what we wanted for the group project.

Because of the stress, clashes within the group and all the other problems we encountered, there would be a big rift within the group project, to the point where people would distant themselves from another and decide to focus on their own things and try to separate themselves from others in the group.

In a group project, abandoning every member of the group because of clashes with a select few is not the most mature way of handling the situation. It’s a shame that I could not have learnt as much as I could have because of the unfortunate events in the group.

Because of all the big drama in the group, the project came to a close and the project never got pulled together towards the end. We may not have succeeded with our project but I did manage to learn the importance of many factors such communication, teamwork, well prepared research and ways in which to respond in certain situations.