GROUP EFFORT

The experience as a group was a very unique and revealing experience. In other classes, I’ve only been in groups with a maximum of 4 people, so to work with 6 was a first for me.

Just to coordinate times to meet on campus was difficult because of different work schedules and class schedules. To make things even more difficult because of personal issues and work I missed many opportunities to meet with group members and several chances to go over our material. Because of this I depended a lot on my group members and a lot on communicating through email to discuss our group material.

When we met for the first time (in class) only 2 of us had similar career interests (healthcare), 2 others had career interest in Public Relations, 1 had a career interest in Dance and another had a career interest in another field. Immediately there were different ideas being thrown around in order to figure out which way start our assignment. We struggled a bit to figure out what topic we would come together on as a group, but finally we settled on health care.

On our second meeting, which was outside of class we were trying figure out (through our interviews) what were some of the major similarities that they all shared and how were we going to present that information to the class. Once we figured out our main conflicts (doctor vs. doctor, doctor vs. patient, doctor vs. family members, etc) we discussed who was going to be finding and presenting information on that conflict. We also discussed that we needed to get outside sources and incorporate our interviews to reinforce information about our conflicts. This was a bit difficult for me because even though I found a lot of information on some of the topics I didn’t want to bombard the class with so much information that they would become disinterested and bored. I wanted to just leave the class with just information that got straight to the point.

Each member of the group had something that they excelled in: organizing material, finding the specific conflicts, finding supporting information (interviews or personal experiences), finding relatable videos, finding outside information, and delegating tasks.

Then came the hardest part, knowing all this information how do we make this appealing to the class? We thought of games and videos. Knowing our time limits we decided to incorporate several videos of popular healthcare/hospital shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, House and Private Practice, because a lot of people are visual learners, we figured that many of these students have at least heard of or have watched these shows, the videos would help reinforce our main points and most of all they would enhance our presentation.

I prepared for our presentation by going to the Media Center and rehearsing my portion of the speech aloud in my room, multiple times. I also recorded myself rehearsing and watched it back, to make sure that the volume of my voice didn’t wane and to make sure I gave the audience proper eye contact. Overall I was satisfied with the group work. Although I wished we had more time so we can go over the group material everyone did put a lot of effort into their assigned task.