International Groups

 

Until this semester, I had clung to my first group-mates for dear life. I never ventured outside of my circle, and found myself doing much more work than the others. Therefore, when I returned this semester, I felt that a change in my group attitude was needed. I had already changed my work and social habits, and had devoted myself to changing my image in the minds of the professors. In order to do this, I decided, I needed a change of group atmosphere. Was it possible to find a group that didn’t procrastinate, and didn’t leave all of the work to me?

So came about my change of heart. Unfortunately, my change of groups did not bring about the results I expected. In all of the projects, our teams are international (it would be impossible for me to be in a non-international group, seeing as I am the only American). I am finding that the exchange students are just there to have fun, and do not care much for the class work or projects. They would much rather sleep off their hangover than attend the lectures. That presents a problem for those of us that are full-time students, since we are forced to integrate them into the group and catch them up on all of the material taught in class. This is a huge waste of precious time that I do not have much of this semester. As for the Germans…well, Germans will be Germans I guess. They want to work a lot (but not very efficiently) and have every little detail planned out. But the real problem that they present is that they are so stuck on being perfect that if one little detail isn’t ideal, then the whole project is inadequate. For example, in one project right now, my German group mates have decided that our project in general is not good enough, and they would like to find a new (and perfect) project to take its place. This brings up several issues- we have already cleared the current project with the professor which makes it, in principle, set in stone; and changing the project now would waste even more time when we are on a tight deadline.

My supposition to international group work is as follows: You Can’t Win.

Group work is a waste of time if the cultures that make up the group are disparate in their thinking and work ethic. As an American working with Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Bavarians, and various other cultures, I have encountered many problems related to cultural differences. But the differences between Germans and less perfectionist cultures (such as the US) is that the Germans refuse to give up an ounce of quality for the preservation of the relationship within the group. My German group members have made the atmosphere of our group tense and inconducive to a successful project. We now have four conflicting ideas of what the perfect project would look like. My attempts to find a new group this semester have left me even less satisfied than my trusty old procrastinating group mates had.

(The photo is of 3/4 of our Crocs EU Marketing Project group in 3rd semester)