This is my last school related rant. I swear.
There is an Oscar Wilde quote that goes something like: "Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself." While I don't necessarily agree with that statement, there are times when I agree a little too much. There are times, Lord knows, there are times. Let's take last week for example.
Last week we had our first group paper and presentation due in my Strategic Management class. In addition to writing one of the five sections, I agreed to proofread, edit and format the dang thing and one of the other group members would work on the slides for our presentation. Both items were due Thursday at 3:00. I got three people's "final revisions" at 8:00 p.m., 9:30 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. THE NIGHT BEFORE. Not only did I not get these in what I consider to be a timely fashion, two of the three sections were riddled with spelling and grammar errors and one had no citations at all. Some of the errors were even caught by spellcheck and were underlined in red but the person was too damn lazy to even correct those. That is how little they proofread their own work. I didn't expect to have to be going through these things fixing large blatant errors at the very last minute. I was up until 1:00 a.m. and finally just had to give in and go to bed since I had to be up at 6:00.
The presentation? Yeah, I didn't see rough copies of the slides until 10:30 THE NIGHT BEFORE the presentation. I would rather have more chunks taken out of my boobs then do a presentation anyway and this just made it oh so much better. Since I was up until 1:00 a.m. editing, formatting and cursing people I didn't get a chance to pull together notes on what I was supposed to say the next day. Luckily, I have a really understanding boss who let me punch out early, sit in my office with the door closed and work on what I was going to say so I didn't entirely embarrass myself.
In some ways I am envious of the people who clearly don't spend the time sweating things like deadlines, quality work or leaving your team members in the lurch. But then I realize that being an inconsiderate, self-absorbed, douche nozzle isn't really something I'm interested in becoming.
Four more weeks and one more group paper with these people. Guess who won't be volunteering to pull together the paper?
1 comment:
Group papers are a nightmare. Did they at least take your advice to not use such crappy sources? If only I had read this before I drank my beer tonight... I would have raised my pint in your direction to congratulate you on being THIS much closer to being DONE!!
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