"There's No 'I' in Team"

I can say that I enjoyed working in my group with Camilla, Nathan, Kylee, Gavin and Laura. I can remember when we first got assigned to being group partners, and we seemed kind of confused about what to do at first because our major choices seemed kind of mixed up. I believe that 2 out of the 5 of us had law-related choices, so we decided as a whole to choose to interview a corporate lawyer. I thought that was great because we didn’t waste to much time on the decision, we all communicated to each other and we benefitted from it as a result.

Throughout the process, we all utilized Facebook to our full advantage. On pretty much a daily basis we kept ourselves posted on our overall progress. We used Facebook to share ideas and links, assign parts to each other, ask questions and schedule meetings. First we exchanged numbers then we all agreed on who would do the initial blog post for the project, which didn’t take long at all. We then posted different links that had different information and descriptions for the types of lawyers so we all would know exactly what we were getting into. Once we voted to do a corporate lawyer, we decided that our communication issue we would discuss would be how it’s difficult for some regular citizens to break down what lawyers say in their own terms. We then came up with a list of questions that we felt should be asked to the lawyers we would interview. Then we agreed to meet as a whole for the first time on a certain day. We definitely used technology to our advantage as a means to thoroughly communicate to each other.

Whenever we got together for project ideas the conversations always flowed and we all made sure we heard each other out. Both of the meetings took place in the McKeldin Library where we met and brainstormed our next moves. In the first meeting we spent time catching up and looking at the groups’ progress as a whole. After that meeting we went and finished up our interviews and other individual work, while keeping each other updated through Facebook. Once we finished our interviews we emailed Camilla our notes and she took those and organized a script for us to practice in the second meeting. We all met for the second time in McKeldin the night before our presentation. In this meeting we all rehearsed our parts for the presentation, which was very beneficial to our presentation. It was a good way for us to test our group chemistry and make different adjustments to the script as we went along in order to make our presentation flow smoother.

I definitely think this group project was a good experience. I think we did a good job of avoiding groupthink by communicating to each other and making sure each person had their fair share of the workload. We also tried to find ways to be creative and not do the typical group project (hence the interactive candy game and the conclusion rap, done by yours truly). Hopefully, you enjoyed our presentation as much as we enjoyed presenting it to you.