Completion of college group projects beholds the truth of last-minute panic and “just to get through” presentations. This comes in addition to the “apparent” plan of preparing an amazing project.
We can all admit that the completion of any group project in college is a giant mess which is dealt with last minute, just before the deadline. And even though we need to come up with presentations in almost every semester, we just don’t seem to learn from our experiences.
It all begins when the professor drops the bomb on a group presentation. Sometimes the group is decided on some parameters set by the professor, in which case the issue is relatively sorted. However, chaos erupts when students are expected to decide their own teams. There will be one to two groups that are filled with the class toppers and get decided quickly. However, they do get a lot of proposals from people eager to be a part of their team. This process goes on until the last minute before all the students without any group automatically turn into a team.
Having a team, however, is only the first part. The only thing that happens in time for the project is the creation of a WhatsApp group which is absolutely non-functional for the next few days. There might still be a couple of members enquiring about what to do but they also end up losing interest after the silence of other members. A bit of energy surges when someone all of a sudden suggests an idea regarding the project and the other members applaud the “concrete” effort made. Eventually, that idea is selected because it happens to be the only suggestion made so far.
Life is infused into the deserted group after the clock ticks down to the final few days and the members realize that they have little time left. They start selecting their topics and needless to say, the basis of their selection is the one they find the easiest and least time-consuming. And every group has that one unlucky person who isn’t online at that time and ends up with having to do the difficult topics. Oh, how they wish to exercise their freedom of choice and re-distribute the topics!
There will also be the one lazy person who simply copy-pastes the paragraph into the slides. Well, you can’t really blame him because he was low on time already. It is worthy to find out that the group also has an enthusiastic member hiding their potential until now but suddenly starts flooding the group with messages full of questions and doubts. But every group has that one hilarious member acting to be the one providing direction but does absolutely nothing.
The pressure keeps building with each minute that passes by and finally someone from the group steps up and takes control of the situation. They try to coordinate all the members and their work, explaining how to go about things. Clarifying everyone regarding what they need to do and setting deadlines, the person seems to have made sure the plan goes through. But the suffering just doesn’t seem to end and we all know why. How many of us have actually adhered to deadlines?
The night before the presentation and after a lot of “brainstorming” the presentation seems to finally be done. But the drama doesn’t end there. The one guy who set up the idea and co-ordinates everything keeps on repeating and clarifying things to the others minutes before the presentation. It will be wrong not to address the last minute panic some doubts of the members create. Finally, the presentation begins and with God’s grace and a bit unorganized team effort, things seem to go well. What a relieving moment it is when the presentation ends.
We do realize that this time things were not sorted and a lot of avoidable glitches happened. But hey, we always have the next time, right?
Feature Image Credits: Dreamstime
Karan Singhania
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