Past experiences working in a team

This week my blog topic is about past experience in team assignments. Before I began this paper I had only ever worked in a team for an assignment once before, which did not give me a lot of excitement for this paper.

Last semester I was to perform a case report on a dog with bladder problems in a group of 5. We did not have any group roles and I found that everyone had different skill levels and ways they did things. This made the final parts of the assignment quite hard because a lot of time was spent editing and giving the assignment one voice.  Everyone also had different ideas on how much research they were required to do, this caused some topics to be very broad with a lot of information while some were lacking important details.

We also had a problem with one student who never turned up to our group meeting and submitted little research to the assignment, this left the rest of the group to make up for his work to ensure we still received a good grade which meant he would also unfairly get a good grade due to our work. Luckily the four other people in the group worked quite well together and had the same goals which meant we could get a lot of work done quickly and were able to get a great grade for ourselves.

Another good part about that team was the fact that we were all Veterinary Technology students and therefore knew each other to a degree which meant we didn’t have the awkward part of getting to know one another.  

Overall it was a good learning experience but did put me off future group work however the team I am in for this assignment is a lot more organised and everyone participates well so I feel that this will be a much better team assignment than what I have previously had.