Thursday, March 14, 2013

How group projects/papers are like Survivor

Whenever I hear about a "group" assignment, I cringe a little inside. I don't think it's an aversion to working with others, but it's all the little problems that go along with it. It's like first episode of Survivor where all the contestants must work together, or they'll probably die in their sleep.... except I don't think anyone has died yet from not participating in a group project...

  1. You have to accommodate the schedules of 4-8 people and find a time and date when everyone can meet. This alone is almost impossible. In survivor they just drop you all from a plane and you HAVE to swim to the island, otherwise you'll die. It's pretty good incentive.

  2. You set up your shelter: When you finally meet your tribe, the natural-born leader will speak. If not, the challenge is to try having only one of you speak at a time; and figure out how to build the damn thing well, so you don't die in the middle of the night.
  3.  You play the reward challenge. You are no longer an individual but you're playing for your whole tribe: You have to completely lose your writing style and morph it into the writing style of a 5-headed creature named John-Becky-Joe-Sally-Mo.
  4.  You have to put your faith in John... and Becky and Joe and Sally and Mo... and trust that they will actually do their individual parts/tasks for such project. If they don't, you will starve that night. And you are likely plotting on having them cast off of the island. You can't do that in real life. Although I'm sure there's some sort of group-work blacklist that we all create in our heads.
  5. You also must trust that they'll do their portion on time. If their individual part is not completed fast enough, you fail.
  6. Then Jeff comes over to your tribe and asks the leader, "Tell us what happened out there today?" Which is similar to having a master editor to go over the whole thing to make sure it doesn't sound like 5 different people wrote it. After all, you're suppose to be a tribe that works together. If you start singling people out, they're likely to have their torch put out.
So really, when you think about it, would you rather be stuck on an island alone and have to do all the work yourself, but not deal with a whole shwoop-a-loop of people? Or be stuck on an island with a group and face the challenge of working together (knowing that you'll have the hard workers and the shit-sippers all mixed together) but ultimately do less work than you would have alone?