Flashes of Panic

Julie put up a scorching post yesterday evening starting, “There are a lot of morons in the world, and inevitably my grade will be affected by it.”

The situation sounds familiar to me, and with reason: I’ve nearly throttled my partner(s) on more than one group project in my time taking continuing education courses.

There was the time, in the systems programming course, where we had a programming project to do. I understood pretty much how the program was supposed to work and how I would block it out—that is, I could write the pseudo-code. However, I’d never compiled a working C program before, and the project was to be done in C. My partner didn’t quite get the assignment, but claimed he’d taken a course where they had used C. Great, I thought, between us this should be easy. Well, maybe not. By the day before the due date, with the pseudo-code mapped out and the relevant system calls in place, it became clear that all the C my partner knew was the third letter of the alphabet. I spent a long evening with K&R making something that would compile, and submitted the project with the names of all the people who made actual contributions—that is, just mine.

That was the worst-case scenario. There was another project where I carefully avoided trying to do it myself (though I thought I’d do better on my own than I would with the group,) and we all ended up not really being able to pull it off—the whole didn’t even equal the sum of its parts, because nobody had the missing piece we needed. And I did manage a few group presentations for other classes where we did actually manage to split the work pretty evenly and do a good job.

There are two reasons I think I’ve had what trouble I’ve had. First, I’m a bit of an unusual student at night school. The bulk of night school students are people who, for whatever reason, never finished (or started) their first college degree, not people who are changing their academic field like I am. I’ve got a (relatively) successful academic record behind me, which makes me (ironically) a bit of a black sheep at night school, through no fault of mine or the other students.

Second, I don’t think I ever learned to work group projects properly in my earlier education experience, for various reasons (some of which I suspect I share with Julie here.) Maybe if I’d grown up in a, uh, more challenging school system, but by the time I even made it to high school I was already solidly in the “if you want it done right, do it yourself” camp.

In a way, I think I want to go to grad school to put myself in a position to work on projects I can’t handle myself, with other people working at my level. On the other hand, I fear that I may not be any better at working with a group than I ever was… and that, perhaps, next time I will be the dead weight in the group.

That’s probably enough paranoia for today.

Now playing: Cool In The Backseat from ‘Mousse by The Nields