Group Project

So I'm currently at the tail end of working on a group project and it has been tough. We are competing in a development competition in Minneapolis with 4 other colleges. Basically the committee running the competition gives us a piece of land in our case an 18 acres site in one of the Minneapolis suburbs and we are supposed to come up with a development proposal for the site.

Well this started in early February and we have meet at least once a week since. I was involved in this same competition last year and it was completely different. First of all I think last years project was significantly easier. We had the opportunity to choose to one, two, or all three parcels and come up with a development plan for each. We chose to only do one and we only had one building on it. This year we are proposing at least 6 and we have to come up with a construction schedule and costs for each and then a financial pro-forma and other financial information. Anyways last year we also had six guys working on it and we were all pretty committed and we all had no idea what we were doing. We ended up doing pretty good, we got third but we think we got hosed ;).

So this year has just been completely different we have had 13 people involved and I have been put in a position of "leading" this group and it is like people wait for me to give them things to do and it is very frustrating. Also I would say there are like 2-3 of the people in the group who have actually put a significant amount of time into this project and the rest have put very little. The experience has definitely taught me a lot about group work. Being in a position to delegate is a tough position to be in. Its like you have to understand where the whole project is going and how to explain each part to each person. It is ridiculous how delegation seems like something that is so easy, I mean you just tell other people what to do right? It has been quite the journey and it has been very stressful. I can not wait for the project to be over. We have until Wednesday afternoon to get it finished and we have some major things to get worked out before then.

I have just been very stressed out with this project and am nervous about us getting it finished, So I thought that blogging about it might help a little.

Well hopefully we can make this thing fly in a few days :). I only have like forty more days till graduation, that is a solid positive to think about!