Reflection on Team-based Research Project Proposal

After spending nearly one semester on our group project, I've found that I learnt a great many things. I found that despite having worked in projects before, there are new things that I have had to adapt to in project work.

First is that having too much freedom might be a bad thing. Making the choice for our project, we were given almost complete discretion. Whilst at first seeming to be a great boon, this soon turned out to be very frustrating. We found that our project choice was in fact very vast, and that soon posed some problems (that we resolved in the end).

Second, I have realised that time-management is of the utmost importance in project work. I have found that despite the hectic timetables of our group, we still managed to meet regularly. On occasion, our meetings might have started late, however we managed to conduct the meetings productively.

Thirdly, I have had to adapt to the occasional loss of focus and procrastination. This happened to myself once or twice, and while it was not even remotely catastrophic, it could have led to problems down the line.

Through working with my group, I’ve learnt very much about managing projects. I was chosen as the de facto leader of the project, and this allowed me to assign work to those whom I believed to be most suited. This delegation allowed my project mates to contribute to their strengths and still have enough time for their other academic and external activities.

Despite my group mates constant worries, I believe that as a group we have managed to perform exceeding any expectations for this project, especially with the problem that we selected. Indeed, while I was not expecting us to fail, I was initially expecting us to produce work of a slightly lower quality, with more generalities and uncertainties. However, we managed to produce a proposal that has impressed all of us.

There are of course, areas for improvement. I think that we could have possibly worked more efficiently, and perhaps been a bit more focused. Our meetings had slight tendencies to be distracting and occasionally unproductive in the first half hour.

All in all, I have enjoyed working with my group. They have taught me valuable lessons about focus, time management and that while people may seem to be perfect, nobody is infallible.