Conquering the Group Project

For our group projects, the class was mostly divided into different groups based on compatibility of majors, and once formed, our group joked a little about the fact that we were the “reject group”. This was because there was very little commonality between our majors. Therefore during the norming stage, most of our discussion as a group was trying to find a common thread between our different majors and desired occupations, which took quite a while and was a little bit of a struggle. I must admit, we did not really meet face to face as a group until the night before our presentation, mostly because we all had scheduling conflicts, and it was hard to find a time where we could all meet, and some people were not having the interviews with their people until Tuesday or Wednesday, so Thursday was the best night for all of us. Also, I think we were all a bit confused about what the assignment exactly entailed, and so perhaps we put it off a little bit. We did, however, communicate with each other via email and Facebook during the interim between when our group was formed and when we actually met in person.
The night before our presentation, we all met in McKeldin to work on our project. I must admit I was a little apprehensive, because I was still a little unsure about what exactly we had to accomplish. However, once we sat down and got to business, we all figured it out pretty quickly once the storming process began. I was grateful for the fact that everyone seemed very focused on the task at hand. Once we knew what we had to accomplish, we got right down to it. Once again, however, we had to figure out a way to find a common thread between all of our interviews, which were with people in very different professions, varying from an actor to an business owner to a manager at a car dealership, etc.! In order to find a common thread, we all began to go around the table and each give an answer to the interview questions we had come up with earlier in the process. However, this became too time consuming, and so I had to suggest that we summarize our interviews for the sake of time.
Finally, after much brainstorming, we came up with the idea of creativity as our topic, and everything was pretty fluid from then on. One thing I liked about our group is that though one person may have been in a leadership role in initiating one idea, someone else would take the lead when it came to something else. We all were good at bouncing ideas off of each other and respecting the opinions of others, even if we disagreed or thought that our idea would work better. We settled a lot of issues and problems through majority rule, and thankfully everyone was fine with this and it was an effective process for our group. I feel like all the member in our group were pretty comfortable with each other, which made decision making and brainstorming much easier. Sometimes we got a little off track or topic, but I and others tried to bring us back to the situation at hand if need be. I would say that each member of our group, myself included, were in maintenance and performing task roles at different times throughout the meeting. We all were respectful and assumed active roles, but also initiated and encouraged ideas and were open-minded, and tried to be cognizant of time constraints for the most part. I was happy with the way that our group pulled together, and am pleased with our final result. Good work, team!