By Rachel Ogbaretin

Tales of uni group work

We been working in teams for a while now, it’s quite nice, I didn’t get a lot of opportunities for group work at uni. It’s always cool to have a group of people who are passionate and want to create, I’ve had some bad experiences where I was normally left alone to finish a project and someone else to take full credit, it has made me slightly weird when it comes to future groups, so I gonna apologize in advance if I do come off as mean, I love you really!

I have a little story of a experience I had with group, in hopes that we can all be careful to not be that “guy”, I also refuse to take the pumpkin spiced latte they owe me out of pure spite. This was with some random girl in my first year, she was super nice and fun to talk to, I still keep in contact from time to time, I don’t hate her but we won’t be collabing in the future. It was in first year, we were to create a 30+ page zine based on anything within a group of 2. I didn’t know anyone and I was happy this girl ask to be in a group with me. We sat down to decide what our zine will be, we decided to make a illustrated food zine.

We were supposed to work overnight so could get the files ready to screenprint the next day. I did some illustrations for zine while she did the layouts and copy. The next day she didn’t show up and texted me she forgot to do anything, so I was stuck with doing everything due to the tight deadline which meant a late night for me and night out for her, I told myself it was fine though since the zine was looking really nice and really want a friend then, next day we screen printing and she came in the afternoon with a headache and no money, so I had to pay expenses for the print room and paper, she also didn’t go to the mandatory print class we all did, so I was stuck with spending all day in freezing room on my feet printing while she sat in cafe nearby. It took me a while to print all the pages nicely but I did it, the books were due for a festival deadline the next day and I had to go clinic, so I asked if she could bind the books together after they dried, she said yes and I left. I never so those books again. I came in the next day excited to see my books bound and I waited in class and waited..and waited for 5 days. Turns out she lost all my work and wanted things to blow over and came back to me apologizing with an offer of a latte...I turned the latte down.

Moral of the story, not all groups are made equal, some will just make you feel used other make you feel like didn’t do anything, all are have a lesson embedded in them, sometimes you gonna be assertive about your position in a group or sometimes you gotta throw yourself more into it even if your not feeling it

Most importantly if they offering to buy a latte, you get the most expensive one.