teamwork, or the lack of

I'd like to talk a little about what went on in my Integrated Experience class for the past two weeks or so.

Since this class is a very teamwork-based class, almost everything we do requires coordination and communication among the group members. The last two projects were a DNA sequencing proposal and a presentation of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. These are all big projects that needed everyone's input.

I think you can see where this is going. Sorry for complaining, but this one member went out of town for the first project, didn't show up in class multiple times, and all he did was sent us an email that tells us what organisms we couldn't use for the sequencing proposal. I'm sorry but that wasn't helpful at all. After it was due, he showed up in class.

Yea, this guy.

And then, the entire group started to prepare for the huge presentation that must be 45 mins on the book, exploring the life, death, and immortality of Henrietta. We have three tables per team, so each table focused on one section of the book. My table was responsible for the death section.

We organized roughly 5 meetings overall outside of class to put together this powerpoint. People got together, discuss what should or shouldn't go into slides, how much information we should deliver, and what questions of ethics we should address.

I want to point out that he didn't show up to a single meeting before the very last one, where he sucked up to my team about being nicer on the team member peer review. I think he pretty much contributed zero to both projects.

Now my team just didn't want to talk to him about it at all. I feel the same, but I think I should probably write him something to explain how we really felt, and why we won't be going easy on his peer review. The problem is he did not demonstrate the slightest effort of trying to help out on the projects. Well, he sent that email, but if he wanted to be helpful he should at least have tried to come up with an organism that could potentially work for the proposal. But NOPE, he gave us a list of organisms that we couldn't use, just like roughly 80% of organisms out there that we couldn't use either.

Oh yea, he didn't even show up to the presentation. I think he didn't want to embarrass himself any further.

I think I might just write him a short letter later, when I have time.

Alrighty, rant's over. Back to my busy weekend.