Group Project Experiences

This is the second time we completed a group project in this class, and as I have mentioned on my previous blog, group projects have always proved to be stressful situations in different ways but once again I personally believe that with this group everything went smoothly and without further complications. My group was assigned with the task of completing a presentation about Economy and Racial Divide. Even though we were the last group to present, we decided to complete all of our work a week before our presentation was due in order to have time to discuss and talk about changes that we agreed upon, and even though many didn't actually followed that deadline, the project was finished relatively fast with regards to the actual deadline and there were not many changes that needed to be done. 

From my own personal opinion this project was a lot harder than the previous one but I think our presentation was great, maybe not the best one since I honestly believe that there were some aspects that could have been improved and there also were some issues during the actual presentation, like connectivity issues and the sort that we could not actually control, but I think it was a good job overall. I personally had to so a lot of research about Racial Divide in the United States and I actually had to look through many different graphs, percentages and articles about it, and even though that does not sound as bad, it was not a pleasant experience for me because most of the articles were biased in one way or another and the information that they were giving was not accurate in almost none of these, thankfully in the end I could gather data from the official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website and complete my part of the project proudly knowing that the information that I provided was as accurate as it could be. 

The only thing about our presentation that I believe could have been changed was once again one of the issues that our first project had, which is that our slides did not have any sense of consistency or continuity, it once again felt like it was a bunch of different individuals work thrown out together in the same place, without having anything to do with each others. There was one person assigned to make sure this would not happen again but I guess in the end we did not communicate as much as we should have about it and the project ended up with the same issue once again, but I guess is not that bad either, looking at the project this way you can kind of see everyone's personality in the different slides, the way they are designed and the different imagery that could characterize them, and the way they decided to arrange them on their own distinctive slides making this project feel more "personal" but disorganized nevertheless.

The first group to present was group 3 and they prepared a presentation about Healthcare and Education. They talked about the different benefits and downsides of having free healthcare and why the United States does not offer free healthcare. They also talked about student loans and student loan forgiveness, who are the eligible for forgiveness, and the effects this might have for college tuition, they also went ahead talked about gun control and the persistent issues with regards to it in the United States, since, sadly every day in the United States there are more than 500 deaths per day that relate to gun violence. It has become such a notorious issue that even right now many students do not even feel safe inside schools due to the tragic "school shootings" incidents. They also talked about homeschooling and the rise it has been through since the Covid-19 pandemic started a few years ago. I believe that this group managed to present and inform us in the class about Healthcare and Education in a splendid way, I believe that their slides were more fluid than ours since they followed the same blue color scheme and slides design.

The second group to present was group 2, and they were assigned to do a presentation about Law and Order and Immigration. I believe that they managed to cover these two themes in a great way in their presentation, they explained and talked about crime rates and the different circumstances that lead to higher crime rates, where are the higher crime rates places, and how demographics affect these rates, they also talked about immigrants and the different reasons why immigrants decide to emigrate, and the struggles that they have to face once they decided to leave their natal country, struggles like discrimination and irrational violence, not being able to find housing nor obtain employment, different language barriers, and not having direct access to basic daily life needs like food, clothes, and transportation and being an immigrant myself I can relate to some of these problems to a certain degree, and for me it was the most touching part of their presentation. They also talked about the immigration policy in the United States and even prepared a video for the class to watch about how some of these policies are "pushing" immigrants to take more dangerous routes. This presentation was also way more organized than ours since they also kept the same color scheme and titles during the whole presentation. 

Once again I believe that completing this project was a pleasing experience and I am actually looking forward to our last presentation, which at the moment feels as it would be the most challenging one but only time will tell. I have no complaints about my current group and I feel really comfortable working on it. I will also be looking forward to the other groups' presentations and what topics they will decide to work on. I hope that this time we can decide on a specific design or organization for our project in order for it to be more organized and feel more like a group project.