There are many academic assignments that students must endure, and there are none more fearsome, rage inducing, and soul crushing as the group project.
In our Fundamentals of Engineering class, everybody was assigned a group that they would work with for the rest of semester. My group consisted of Ben Niu (far left), Matthew Reichert (center left), me (center right), and Matthew Chein (far right). Our group worked on in-class lab projects, helped each other with class assignments, and worked on long-term assignments such as lab reports and a software design project we are currently working on.
The purpose of having a long-term group is to learn to work with other people as a team, and to make the team work. Since we were stuck with each other for a full semester, surviving with a dysfunctional group was not an option if any of us wanted a good grade, so communication was essential to keeping the group together and getting group assignments done on time. Unfortunately, this is not something that we learned instantly. Slow response times and last-minute crunches happened when none of us stepped up to organize our plans.
After around the tenth week of class, Ben dropped the course, leaving us as a group of three. We are currently working on a software design project, and we set our goals high, tasking ourselves with programming a euchre game using MATLAB. Time will tell if we will be able to reach our goal and complete the game on time.