As we are nearing the mid-terms and facing various project submissions for our modules this semester, I have a few tips on how to survive group projects that I would like to share with all my juniors here.
From my 3-year experience in UB, I have gathered that the way to survive group projects is to team up with the awesome people & forge a bond to get around the uselessness of the rest of your group. If you play your cards right, you can overcome more incompetence than you ever thought you could! Here’s how you do it:
1. You & the awesome people will do the majority of the real work. Get used to it. This is how it’s going to be for the rest of your life. If you wanted to not do work, you shouldn’t have been so awesome. Live & learn.
2. You can give a little of real work to the competent with minor prodding people with very specific instructions. Take turns sending them encouraging & over-praising emails. Let these people think they are in with the awesome people. This keeps them happy & semi-productive.
3. Give things that are kind of important but can be done at the last minute—the works cited, executive summary, appendices, & Power Point slides—to the competent but lazy people. The key is to never give them anything that anyone else in your group will have to wait on to be able to do their part. Make them wait for the rest of you, not the other way around.
4. Give things that are necessary but time-consuming & hard to mess up—table of contents, charts & graphs, title page with everyone’s names even though not everyone worked on the project—to the incompetent but not lazy people. These are also excellent people to be put in charge of the printing, but someone from one of the competent groups needs to check everything before you turn it in.
5. Have the incompetent AND lazy people “proofread” everything. Make sure that you save the version you have before they get their hands on it.
6. When peer evaluations come around, agree with everyone that these people did not make positive contributions to the group. Do NOT do anything unless you are sure the rest of your group agrees to do it together. If you are the only giving a bad peer eval to a person & that person gives you a bad eval too, the professor will have no choice but to assume that the two of you had a personal vendetta. However if everyone in the group gives the person a bad eval & that person gives you a bad eval, the professor will assume that that person is “not a team player.” And that is the sweetest revenge.
I guess I sound a little angsty when I wrote the above tips, but I guess it's always good to heed some advice from a senior who has been through much more than you :D
