A.K.A Group Projects Suck

I have come to the conclusion that group projects suck...a lot. I've always disliked group projects, but now I hate them. This is bad being that 3/5 of my classes this semester involve group work.

Before I just disliked them because I used had issues forming groups of more than 3 people in my classes because I usually only had 1 or 2 friends in my class. Now, I hate them because there always seems to be one person that pisses me off in my group.

Up until this year, I was pretty content to let other people in the group make the big decisions and I would do a lot of the grunt work like researching and writing. This year I have actually been getting involved in the decisions. Unfortunately, I keeping getting ignored.

Why is it that there is always one person that doesn't show up for the first couple meetings, but when they do show up they want to take over as leader?

Examples:
Competitive Strategy group: In our first group meeting, we had to choose a group leader, which ended up being me because we drew names from a hat. One girl in our group didn't show up for the meeting (let's all her Ann) and that was fine because we were just brainstorming company ideas. Then it turned out that another group wanted to do the same company as us and "Ann" suddenly designated herself as leader. She would not let the company go, even though we hadn't even done any work on the project and the other group had already written a couple pages.

In class before our meeting with or professor, I researched 8 other organizations that we could use and "Ann" refused all of them. When we talked to the professor, he asked if we had any other companies that we could do, she immediately told him no (20 minutes after I gave her the list).

Also, two weeks ago, it was decide by someone that we were changing our company to Stantec Inc, it broadsided me, but as long as it wasn't our old company I didn't really have a problem. Until we couldn't get the company's approval, that is. But no fear, "Ann" didn't inform our other company that we weren't going to use them anymore, like she was supposed to...a week and a half ago.

So much for being the leader of the group, huh?


Computer Ethics group: On Thursday, I have to present a case study on "Computing Technology in the Workplace" with a group of 6 other people. We've had 3 meetings since October 1st. One guy in the group, let's call him "Al", only showed up for the meeting on Sunday, November 1st. He didn't show up for the other 2 meetings or for class in the last month. Apparently, he's been sick, but he didn't even think to send the rest of the group an email explaining where he's been and if he was coming back.

In our first meeting, he had to decide what our case was going to be. I had told a couple people in the group a somewhat related story about my mom's old job. They decided to use that story as one of the case studies for the presentation. In our meeting on Oct 25th, we had actually read that chapter related to our presentation and added a smaller case study to fill up time. A couple days later, I got inspired by a case study I had to read from another class and wanted to change our first case study to focus on Inventory management instead of privacy. I even wrote out an overview of the case for the only other group member that showed up for the class, thinking that he would inform the rest of the group that was working on the presentation, while I did the paper part.

On Sunday, in our 3rd meeting, "Al" finally showed up and completely took over the group. When I mentioned the change in the case study 1, he said he never even heard of the change. After explaining the case, Al decided that we should stick to the GPS-focus, instead of the inventory system, even though the inventory had 5 times the relevance to the chapter as the GPS palm pilot. He chose the GPS because "we already have a lot down for it". >_> We had a couple bullet points about it. Before the meeting, I wrote 3 double-spaced pages on the inventory system.

He then proceed to talk down to me like I was a child about the presentation portion. He said we each might have to talk during the presentation, which I already guessed, and specifically asked me if I was ok with that. <_< I'm a fourth year university student, I've had to do presentations many times before. Yes, I'm not comfortable with them, but I am capable of presenting. He also asked not once, not twice, but three times if I was ok with talking in the presentation.

So group projects make me want to tear my hair out. It doesn't help that 2 of the guys making the presentation portion have horrible spelling, so I'm probably going to have to spend an extra hour on each project editing.

Oh the joys of grad year....

Please, kill me now.

~Mariko