What are the five most dreaded words your professor can say to you in post secondary? If you guessed: “you just failed the class,” then you’re right. Those of you who guessed: “everyone get into groups now,” you all came a close second. I seriously hate group projects, but in retrospect maybe there is a point in forcing a bunch of strangers to collectedly collaborate on an assignment. I guess it’s to help make sure “we’re all getting along” and working on our “people skills,” because in the real world, we all have to work with people we don’t like and try to cope with those people the best we can.
I’ve had quite a few awful experiences working on group projects. I’ve had to work with the slackers, the people who make the title page of the project and think that’s all they had to do while you wind up staying up till 5 a.m. trying to finish the entire project. Then there’s the magician, the person that vanishes midway through the project, never to be seen again and pretty much screws over the entire project. Now I can handle the stress of an inadequate group member, but what I hate dealing with are the high schoolers. There are two types of high schoolers. One is the group of people that like to gang up on a person because they love living the good old glory days of high school. Two: the person who literally needs you to hold their hand as they try to work on the project. Either way you end up doing most of the work because high schoolers are incapable of functioning without their peers around them. While all these groups of people are hard to work with, the worst among them all is the control freak. The person who self directs themselves as leader of the group. The one that is constantly harassing you to pay attention to grammar on a draft, the one that forces group meetings at 8 a.m. on Saturdays, and the one that loves to threaten to tell the TA or Prof you’re not doing your share. You know the people I’m talking about? They’re the same people that join student council to feel important. I have had to work with a particular person that would literally send me 200 texts a day, would not stop texting me till 5 a.m. and would continuously demand to know when I will be home to work on the project. The problem with working with bossy people is that they are so demanding and seem like they are doing so much, but in reality, all they are doing is barking orders while you end up doing most of the work anyway. I think the moral of the story really is, no matter who you get paired up with, what your grade ends up being on the final paper, or what you gained from the experience, you end up doing most of the work anyway. This semester, choose your group mates wisely and try to keep your sanity intact.