When You Haven’t worked with a Group in 4 Years

The last time I remember completing a group project was during my freshman year of high school. Honestly I can barely remember what I had for dinner last week so I cant exactly tell you how the project ended, but obviously it wasn't so bad if it’s not engraved in my brain. Anyway, when I was tasked during my freshman year of college (how convenient) to work with a group, a part of me was actually excited. I hadn't experienced this in so long and I wanted to break the hatred everyone had for working in groups by proving that collaborating with your peers, isn't so bad.

In the beginning, everything was going great, we each had our responsibilities and planned to meet up outside of class to discuss our project. We were all texting in the group-chat we made about different ideas that we had, and I was feeling confident about everything we had planned. But alas, tragedy struck and our group leader got sick in the midst of our project. This threw our balance way off and left my other group member and I confused as to what to do. She was the one turning in all of the paper work and making sure we stayed on task so when we lost that, it felt as though we were lost ourselves. And mind you, we were due to present in 4 days.

After a day of coming to terms with our new reality, we had to get this poster board done. We probably wouldn't be able to prepare as well as other groups but at least the information we had could be presented with pretty-looking visuals. So, the two of us put a whole tri-fold together in a day and gathered our thoughts 5 minutes before the judges came around to our table and asked us, “So, what’s your project about?”.

Even though we had a major step-back, I’m happy to report that my group and I successfully completed our project without experiencing more then 3 mental breakdowns. (: