First Semester
This semester has taught me a lot of things. The two things that I think of first are presentations aren’t very hard and group work isn’t great. Growing up I have always hated presenting and presentations; it had always caused me great anxiety and it was something I always dreaded doing. Group work has had its ups and downs and I feel like this semester has sort of put a bad taste in my mouth for group work.
One thing that has changed positively for me (for now at least) has been presentations. All throughout high school presentations were the worst part of every class for me, and I still honestly don’t know why. Something about talking in front of a big group of people with all of the attention on me just really stressed me out. But some switch in my head flipped when I got into college, and I am not sure why. But every presentation I have had has gone super well with a lot less anxiety. Not that there wasn’t anxiety going into the presentations but in high school I would think about them for days before and just stress myself out way too much for something that is not a big deal. I have had several presentations this semester and they were honestly kind of fun, one thing I think I have realized about presenting is that most of the people watching don’t really care about your presentation, they are in their own head about their own presentation or just anything.
Group work however is something that I view with a more negative light. I’ve learned that not everyone is reliable and that you should only depend on yourself. Personally, I would think that group work would be better in college than in high school because everyone is forced to go to high school, college is a commitment that you are paying for. Maybe I have just been unlucky with my groups, but I feel like a lot of my group assignments were just miserable due to a lack of communication and work. The most prominent example was for my GROUP communications class, where we had to do a social activity/task out of class and then make a long several page guide about it as well as a presentation going over it for the class. My group who I was stuck with all semester just would not respond to texts or anything, we literally did the entire project the night before it was due. Not to mention I did 50% percent of the work before we even did the social activity, I had set everything up for them to fill in their respective parts and it would be easy for them to do. But when I checked in on their progress at 12 am (it was due at noon), none of them had done anything. I then spent the next 2 and a half hours putting my 50% up to an 80%. I finally went to bed pissed and just decided that if they didn’t finish the rest I didn’t even care because I did everything that was done. In the end we got a 70/70 on the project but it still just was a terrible experience.
Second Semester