It's halfway through the semester and you hear your teacher utter those dreaded words: group project. Unless you're some sort of lunatic, you can probably agree that group projects in college are the absolute worst. I'll never understand why teachers assign them – maybe they don't want to have to grade as much work, maybe they think it'll help us in the real world (lol yeah right) or maybe they just love to watch us suffer. Regardless, no one can escape the group project, well, not unless you were smart and looked at the syllabus ahead of time and dropped the class the second you could. But for those of us who have to suffer through them, here are five reasons why group projects make us all want to die:
1. Having to work with random people you’ve never spoken to before.
I'm not sure what’s worse: getting assigned to a group, or having to find a group in a class full of people you’ve never met before in your life. Either way, these people aren’t your friends, and you already know how this is gonna go; it’s gonna suck.
2. No one's schedules ever match up.
Of course, you end up in a group with the one kid who is president of every club on campus, and the girl who works 100 hours a week so it's no surprise when you and your group members can never find a time to meet that works for everyone. And then when the stars align and you all finally have one hour that you’re all free, someone gets sick and it’s back to square one.
3. There's always the one person who doesn’t contribute ANYTHING.
Your project is due in two days and you and your group members have been doing your time, completing your sections of the project you agreed to do and yet you’re still waiting to hear from that one group member. He hasn’t responded to the emails, GroupMe, still hasn’t even opened the google doc and you’re about ready to rip out your hair because you’ll be damned if you let this slacker cost you an A.
4. You don’t work well together.
It’s hard enough having to come up with a topic for a project or paper on your own, but now you have to get a group of people who somehow all agree on one thing. Either everyone is so overly opinionated that pigs will probably fly before you can all come to a mutual agreement, or everyone is so quiet that not a single suggestion is made until 5 minutes before the project is due, there’s no in-between.
5. You always end up doing all the work yourself.
Since no one else seems to care if you fail, you take matters into your own hands. You kill yourself to pull it all together and make sure everything looks perfect while the rest of your crew seems to just sit back with their feet up, eating bonbons. And the real kicker is your group mates will still get an A, all thanks to you. SMH.
