College is a wonderful experience with so many great memories, it gives us for a lifetime. After graduation there are many things new alumni miss, but group projects are not one of them. In my experience they are stressful and have cost me my time, money, and energy. I do think that they are a necessary evil because in our professional lives we will have to deal with the same characters and personalities we’ve dealt with in our college group projects. Here are 5 types of students you will meet while doing a group project.
The Control Freak: This person is the one who starts the crazy group text and sends you at least 10 text messages asking you just about anything. They get upset with you if you have to go to work and hate working with your schedule. They love being passive aggressive and sometimes even aggressive. They have no shame in their game and will crazy call you in the middle of the night because they over analyzed how your presentation would go and now you have to calm them down.
The Lazy One: This person never shows up to group meetings. They always make excuses like “My girlfriend broke up with me again.” You can’t really say anything to them because you don’t want to start drama in the middle of the semester. They try to do impromptu speaking during the presentation because they did not want to prepare for the presentation. So annoying.
The Pushover: That’s right. This innocent human is the one who tries to make everyone feel comfortable and help everyone out. The control freak usually relies on the pushover to help them get some work done because no one else in the group actually works besides the pushover and control freak. The pushover is a people pleaser and tries their best to agree with everyone and do everyone’s work for them.
The Faker: This person is not quite the lazy one, but they also don’t do much besides act like they are doing something. The faker lies and tells you they have made a lot of progress on a task they were supposed to do. In reality when you ask them to send it to you, they suddenly can’t find that document….aka they haven’t even started. The faker is smarter than the lazy one because they are good at buying time and making the rest of the group members feel like they're actually working.
The Cool One: The cool one helps clear the tension and usually has a great personality. This person is a more effective leader than the control freak. The cool one has proper social etiquette and knows how to manage their leadership over a group, while not looking like an evil dictator. The cool one is well known on campus and knows what resources they can use to make life easier for the rest of the group members when they need more research.
