Working in Teams

Many times throughout my college career I have been involved with teams, not just on the athletic fields, to accomplish a task. I have at times been on teams that worked well together and achieved at a high level, but of course there are always the team experiences that didn't go so well and you are stuck working on more than your fair share and stressed!

I have come to find working on teams for projects can have many advantages and disadvantages. And of course in many of my classes we have had to learn how to best work as a team in order to create more positives than negatives.

With teams it is nice to have the increased amount of ideas, getting to divide up the work and allowing members to focus on what they know best. This results in a better final products, which of course is expected by a professor if you are allowed to work in a team. However, the pitfalls of working on a team in a college course are the students who will not participate evenly because they clearly don't care about their final grade...as long as they pass. These members usually put more stress on the ones who want to achieve a high grade and have to make up for the slacking member. Meeting times are another downfall, college students have many obligations they have to meet and planning for a group to meet gets challenging!

I can say I have stressed out on probably far too many projects during my undergraduate career, but I don't like to just get by on them. I want to produce a result that I can be proud of. Last week was a prime example of it. Meeting with a my group we had 3/4 of our paper done early and waited for the 4th person to send it in. It came far too late and involved reducing the amount of sleep I got caused a lot of stress. But as usual everything was handed in on time. It drives me crazy when people say they will get something done, but then procrastinate and don't follow-through on the task! If you say you will do something, make sure you can and then do it...to the best of your ability!
I do enjoy group work and love the fact more ideas are thought of and more work can get done quickly. And I feel once I am in a job, where everyone is working for the same common goal, working in a group will become more enjoyable and less stressful!