Blog 5: Project Experiences

As most others mentioned in their posts, group p projects are not exactly anyone’s favorite words to hear from a professor. I have attached so many negative connotations to the phrase and hearing it makes me cringe at the thought of getting stuck with a bad group. This time, that was not the case. I was very pleased with my group, in fact, I think this is the only group that I’ve had who was serious about the assignment and its workload. I’m sure that us all being seniors has a lot to do with it. I’ve noticed that the higher level the course, the more time and effort people will put in. Overall, my group and I worked very well together. We only had a few disagreements along the way and this was mostly during the early stages of the course when we began to decide and plan what our final project was going to entail. All of my members played their own roles in the group and participated equally. My favorite thing about working with this group was that we finished our project days before the portfolio was due. I feel like its typical in group projects to be up late the night before finishing it all up. This wasn’t the case for our and it made me feel a lot more confident when presenting because I felt like our work was more solid. I don’t feel like there is anything we could have done differently to improve the way that our group worked together. It was one of the best group experiences I’ve had at Mizzou and definitely made me feel a lot more comfortable about working in groups in the real world.

Blog 5: Project Reflection

As a Communication major I have completed my fair share of group projects so I was pretty sure what to expect in this class; teamwork.  I explained to my roommates, however, that this particular group project has been my most positive of group experiences.  The four of us worked very well together socially and academically.  Our group meetings weren’t a nuisance and, for once, I wasn’t concerned about group participation.  Each of us dedicated a lot of time and consideration to our project and proposal and I am very happy with the outcome of our hard work.  We did, however, reach some obstacles when turning a semester of ideas and research into a consumer product.  For instance, as Communication students, creating a real website and smartphone application was not exactly our forte so some of the goals we set near the beginning of the semester we couldn’t see through.  However, our screen shots, courtesy of Nate, turned out so well that we couldn’t have been happier with a fully functioning website.  The only thing I could think of that could have been done differently would have been utilizing our time better near the beginning of the semester.  We were on a time crunch to complete the portfolio and presentation by the due date which put an uncomfortable amount of pressure on each of us with the stress of finals and other classwork looming over our heads.  Overall, this capstone has been a positive learning experience and I hope to take from it knowledge that I can use throughout my future career.  Thanks for a great semester team!

 

Blog 5: Final Reflections

The beginning of this “journey” was daunting to say the least. We, as the Commies, felt overwhelmed. As we got to know each other and felt comfortable, it changed for the better. I absolutely loved my group and the dynamic we had. We were all dedicated to our project and it made working on it enjoyable. Never did I dread going to a meeting. It reinforced the fact that working in groups does not always have to carry a bad connotation. It was difficult to communicate, especially when everyone had conflicting schedules mixed in with Thanksgiving break. We had to rely on technology even more. We did make the best out of the situation and were able to have most of our project finished by the time we came back from break. I don’t think I would necessarily do anything differently next time. I would have a better attitude about group working going into another project. I will miss our capstone class and group. It was a semester that taught me a lot and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to work with great people. 

Blog 5: Reflection

My experience working together as a team for our capstone project has actually been very satisfying. We all worked together fairly well on this project and were able to get everything done on time. With this project we were even able to go beyond my personal expectations for what our final project would be. This fact was probably the best part of the entire experience. Working together on this project we were able to get more done and end up with a better finished product then I think we could have come up with individually. Although we did have our ups and downs with working together, mostly being that we all had very different ideas and ways of doing things, we were still able to put those differences aside enough to work together on one solid goal which was finishing this class with the best project we could come up with. Of course it was difficult, working on any group project is, for reasons of different ideas, time schedules, and skills levels but since we all had the same ultimate goal in mind we were able to work past these difficulties. If given another opportunity to do this project over again I honestly think I would not do anything differently. Any project will have its own ups and downs and things to work through. With this project I believe that the good outweighed the bad and in the end everything turned out great so for me there is no real need to change anything, except for maybe the project itself.

BLOG 5: Reflection

I can say that I am the person who usually hate working on group projects. I always rather work alone on my own time and know that the project gets done. Though thats how I usually feel about group projects, I must admit that my feelings were different about this one.  Working on this project my teammates were very inventive and very hands all.  I enjoyed working with them and coming to meetings with their portions done.

It was a breathe of fresh air working with people who do want to get their work done, in a timely manner, and done right. Working on this project was different then working on other team projects because I worked with them all semester. At the end of all I couldn’t have asked for a better group and working experience.

What I enjoyed about the project as a whole was that it allowed for us to create something that could actually be useful and resourceful to the city of Columbia. Like someone said in another group if any of these projects were to take off it would be contribution to a city that we dwelled in and were apart of for four years. I loved CoMo Beat and the idea to create it. It was fun thinking of something I would be interested in as well as others in Columbia could be interested in. I think it’s really  a good idea and when we got to pitch it I was really excited to share it with my other class members (hope they vote for us). The best part and the most difficult part was that you didn’t have any parameters, you pretty much came up with what you were going to do on your own. That was the hardest and easiest part of the project, because it was easy once you got going but difficult to get going. I took that as a challenge and one I felt we conquered well. If I were to do this project again I would change some of the marketing tactics. Because we could only use two forms of media I felt a tad limited but I would have came up with some better form of media to capture more of the audience and the people we were trying to pitch it to. I would have loved to make a commercial for this class to draw in people’s attention (and votes). All in all I enjoyed the process and the class overall.

 

Blog 5: Team Commies Group Project

The experience doing our team project for Capstone was very positive.  I thought The Commies, my group for the community information project gelled together well and brought all of our ideas together to create a great final project.  I was proud of how we all worked together in implementing our ideas in a way that reflects each member’s ideas.  Going into the project I did not know any of my team members and I feel it was a great experience getting to know everyone.  We worked hard to keep focus on our main goals while also having some fun along the way.  I think group projects helped me learn how to communicate in a group environment and do take each team members contributions in a positive way in order to maximize the projects potential.

The Commies

 

The Good:

Our group got along well and had fun completing our project, even when it seemed like it would never end.

 

The Bad:

It’s hard to always be able to communicate effectively within group settings and to get everyone on the same page with everyone’s crazy schedules.  This project will improve my communication in this aspect.

 

I would do this differently:

I would communicate better with my group and have made myself more available to meet.  Overall, our project and group was GREAT!  Couldn’t have been more happy with last semester and SO glad it’s over!

Blog 5: The Final Destination

Wombat…

I want to first start out by saying my group is awesome. everyone contributed equally and if someone could not make a commitment another person gladly stepped in and picked up the slack. We met before class every time we needed to. I had a great time getting to know my members and interacting with them. I thought it was good because we had a diverse group of people and each person brought different aspects of themselves to the project. Having the least amount of people was an advantage for us. We were more personal and there were no cliques within our group. Everyone got along great. The only part that was difficult was actually deciding on what we wanted to do for our project. After we had a good direction for our presentation everything else seemed to fall into place. To be honest I would not do anything different. It was a pretty generic group project. I might have had meetings over some drinks instead of on campus but other than that everything was awesome. I relly enjoyed doing this as my Capstone project.

Boomtown. (wombats?)

 

Blog 5: Teamwork

As almost everyone so far has remarked, group projects are typically the bane of a student’s existence. In all my years of schooling, I think I have only had a single other group project that I did not loathe. I have very high standards for the work that I put forth, and when the standards of my other team members do not match my own (as I have almost always found to be the case), I usually just end up doing all the work on the project. However, in this project, I was impressed by my fellow team members’ initiative, dedication, and desire to produce high-quality work. We all had very ambitious goals for our performance on the projects and in the class overall, which was became evident in our efforts to work together as a team towards achieving a common goal. I think this partly stems from the fact that everyone in my team came from a group of upper-level college students – by this point in our academic careers, most of the individuals who did not have the ambition to succeed and the drive to work hard in their studies have been weeded out, and those of us that are left have a lot riding on our performance in the final classes of our undergraduate careers.

What I enjoyed about this experience was the opportunity to work with peers that were creative, motivated, and willing to work hard to create really great work, especially with our final presentation. When we met, everyone was very open to exploring ideas, making a thorough analysis of our work, and pushing ourselves to the next level to create a presentation and portfolio that truly represented the best of our knowledge and abilities. In my opinion, I think we came up with a proposal that would be very beneficial and practical if enacted in reality. Our group worked well together and we had very few problems. I can honestly say this was the best group project experience I have ever had.

The only real problem we ran into was, as my fellow team members have mentioned, the difficulty of coordinating our schedules to find times that all of us could meet for long enough to be productive. However, we were able to make use of email as well as divide up the work so that we could make the most of our time, and so the meetings we had were extremely productive and we were able to accomplish a lot in those times. If I had to do this project again, I would probably try to either meet in person more often, or utilize something like Skype or virtual meetings to be able to make a greater use of group interaction to develop our ideas, especially early on in project development. With this kind of work, it can be all too easy to just divvy up the work and have each person take on a small part, and then put it all together at the end; however, group projects really benefit from having brainstorming sessions that incorporate contributions from the all the members, and this type of interaction ensures that all members are following a common theme and the final project is cohesive. I think our final proposal was much better than our mapping project because, for one thing, we all knew each other better and were more comfortable working together at that point, and, because of that, we met in person much more and used those sessions to develop ideas and ensure that we were all working towards the same goal, and that each of our individual parts reflected that. Our group dynamics naturally changed much over the course of the semester, but I really enjoyed working with the rest of the Community Cats in this class and I am very happy with the overall experience.

Blog 5: Respone to Team Project

 

Community Cats

Overall, working with the Community Cats for this presentation was a  experience that ended up being very rewarding. I found that each one of my collaborators was very ambitious in their approach to this assignment and our Capstone as a whole.  Our first meeting together to brainstorm about our topic proved to be fruitful and the idea of building The Hub was birthed. It was easy to bounce ideas off of each other because we were already comfortable and had built a good group dynamic when constructing our mapping presentation. The only aspect that ever gave us trouble was finding times to meet when everyone could attend, but we managed to coordinate our schedules accordingly for the most part. For me personally, it was difficult sometimes to make impactful contributions when I knew my teammates had already came up with such great ideas. At least for the final project, I did more work “behind the scenes” and helped the other develop their ideas. It was really incredible to see how meticulous they were in designing the portfolio and putting together the virtual tour. I still can’t believe Jeanne was able to put that digital model together.

BLOG 5: Trinity Trackers

I will be the first to tell anyone how much I hate group projects! So, you can imagine how much I dreaded this one, especially since it lasted the entire semester. However, in the end I think our teamwork turned out to work for the better!

Overall, our group worked really well collaborating. Bouncing ideas off each other definitely helpd shaped our project into what it turned out to be. In the beginning, our mapping presentation was a little rocky. Yet as the semester went on, everyone became much more accustomed to each other and began to create a product that all of us are proud of! It helped a lot that all the group members were free during the same time each week, so we made it a habit to meet at least once a week, if not more, to discuss our project and how we were thinking about executing it.

The difficulty with this project, and the majority of other group projects, was making sure everyone was on the same page and matching priorities. For example, I, personally hate procrastinating,  and I like getting things done before the day they are due, because I don’t work well under pressure :/. My time frame was not always the same as everyone elses and this was something I had to overcome and eventually learned to have faith in my teammates! Since it being senior year, everyone had different priorities as an accumulation for other classes, jobs, etc…posed to be an obstacle that we all had to deal with.

In the end, we worked together and created a project that reflects the best of our abilities!