Own Experiences During Group Project

I really enjoyed the process of completing this project. At the beginning I was a little nervous about the whole process of dividing the work among the group members and having to present my work in front of the whole class, but everything went smoothly and without any real complications. I am not really used to working in groups and although I generally prefer working alone without having to rely on anyone else, learning to work together with people is a really important life-long skill that we all need to have to be successful in life. I’ve had many group works along my whole academic life and they’ve almost always somehow proved to be a kind of stressful situation in different ways, and I personally tend to avoid having to complete my assignments this way whenever is possible, however, this group project wasn’t like that at all, (at least from my own experience when we were working in this project) we divided the work equally and very fluently without any issues, everyone did their job, even though we were the first group to present, and arguably had way less time than the rest of the groups, almost everyone had already had their presentation ready a day or two before the presentation was due, which is always a relief, and allows us to further discuss about our own and other’s members work before we present. 

I think that learning about Intercultural Communication and the meaning of culture was very interesting and is really important for our lives. Professor Sherry's decision to start teaching the class by teaching us about chapter 3 is also really interesting and smart, since by learning about this chapter we will really learn how to live and coexist with each other and even work better in groups since, we live in a really culturally diverse part of the world, where many cultures would  This chapter, which is the chapter that me and my group presented, taught us about culture and communication, including dominant cultures, co-cultures, cultural identity, and how all of these cultures differ. During the project I had to research how to develop intercultural communication competence, and the different potential “barriers” that could be problematic when communicating with people from other cultures and I personally found out that many of these “barriers” could be present on almost everyone unless we are aware of them and try to avoid them.

The next group that presented discussed chapter 9, which is about communication in groups. This chapter taught us about the different natures and types of groups, some characteristics of healthy groups, the different stages that conform to a group, and the conflicts that could exist within those groups. Group 2 managed to explain and present all of this chapter’s content in a splendid way. What I personally liked about their presentation was that their presentation had a consistent organization, while our group didn’t really have one, my group presentation had a bunch of different slides that could really stand out by themselves and had really nothing to do with each other, while group’s 2 presentation looked like a notebook with a green background and each slide was a different page of it, making everything flow more fluently. Their imagery and the videos that they showed were also really interesting, they even managed to include a clip of a marvel movie within the context of the presentation, I actually think that was great, and even though I’m not a fan myself of anything that relates to this franchise, I’m well sure that there are many students in the class that surely do enjoy it, and by using one clip of that relates to the presentation, in this case to explain the 5 stages of group development, I think that this was really clever way to keep these students focused on the presentation or at least grab their attention.

Finally, group 3 made a presentation about chapter 10, group leadership and problem solving. In my opinion, group 3 also managed to present all of chapter’s 10 contents in a great way, they explained us how leadership works, taught us how to run effective group meetings, both as a leader and as a member, they taught us about all the steps of systematic problem solving, showed us how to communicate solutions within a group in different ways, and how to evaluate if one group is actually being effective or not. This group’s presentation was also really organized and well structured with a little more variations in the slides than the second group but maintaining the whole color scheme throughout the whole presentation. This group also managed to include many interesting clips, including one The Office clip which talks about conflict within that show’s specific group, which we didn’t really get to finish in class, because of time issues, but what I mentioned about the marvel clip that group 2 showed the to the class could also apply in this case. I honestly believe that when students take the liberty to truly “make” their presentations their own by giving it some more of their personality by including clips and things they enjoy, in their work, making great use of them to get their points across, and the fact that professor Sherry encourages these kinds of students is really encouraging for me and surely for the whole class too.

I am looking forward to working together again with my own group on future projects for this class. I am really comfortable with my own group, there are certain things that could be improved, like for instance, making each student’s work have some sort of consistency that could prove that everything is part of the same project, like the other groups did, instead of having a bunch of randomly designed slides that could stand on their own and have no real connection with each other. I am also looking forward to seeing the other groups work in the next projects, since they have proved with this last one that they are also great groups that seem to take their work seriously and deliver great results.