Today I had a meeting with the group that I do not like. From my experience, these are highly motivated individuals, but we had too many strong and opposing opinions, which makes collaborating with each other so miserable. Plus, many do not like it when the parts that they spent their efforts on mismatch the rest of the contents and they almost fight to keep that. Not to mention that many members didn’t even show up to meetings/classes and made no attempt to catch up and reach out.
I learn a few lessons in terms of group formation after this experience:
- In a small group project, don’t have groups with more than 3-4 members. Trust me, bro, having more than that makes scheduling and communication an absolute disaster.
- If you would like to make changes to other people’s slides in terms of design, make sure you ask the group first, something like “Do y’all care if I change the styles to make things consistent?”
- If you think the contents need to be changed, put some comments in and let them know. But beware of this – prioritize the most urgent comments first so you don’t overwhelm them. Smaller details that can be easily fixed should be left for later.
- Don’t make any assumptions. Explain things clearly with what, why, how, and when in terms of conversations.
- Finally, it is easier said than done. If you are an overachiever or a perfectionist, you will always see issues and want to solve them. You will always spend more time and effort on the project than other people. But people like you helps a broken project become streamlined and coherent.
Trang "Tee" Nguyen 