Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

We are in deep exam season here in the third year of HEI. Next to the 4 upcoming exams we also have a scientific study in chemistry. It is a scientific review of a specific subject. Mine is "Decaffeinating coffee, supercritical fluids". It is an interesting subject to work on, I especially enjoyed my part focused on supercritical fluids. We have a team of six to work on this project.

The point is to base this study purely on scientific articles; the sources need to be clean. We have not done this kind of strict study beforehand, so I like the structure. It really makes you search for good information and create purely scientific text.

The slight problem we have with our group is cooperation. No one took any initiative so I took it upon myself to set some deadlines to get a first draft before exam season. Out of six only three people respected said deadline, even though everyone agreed beforehand that it would be a good time to finish a first draft.

Anyway, fast forward to three days past said deadline, this Saturday. At this point, we have three days left before the real deadline. We wanted to send it to our responsible teacher to get a little feedback. That being said we only had half of the project done. We started doing the parts of the others with the three people that had done their part.

So our workload literally doubled, because some people did nothing and did not communicate it. Well actually, I stand corrected. One of the three sent a little text, which was 73% generated by AI and another sent one that was 50% generated by AI. This whilst, of course, not citing a single scientific article.

Anyway, we understood that it was a lost cause. So, on Saturday, we met up at 12:30 and got to work. After 10 hours of work, we managed to send our teacher the first draft around 23:00. It was exhausting. What got to me was coming home and going on social media and seeing one of the non-communicative teammates going around bars during the day.

Teamwork makes the dream work. Our little group of three was pretty efficient in constructing the full project and I am rather happy with the outcome. There are only slight retouches to bring to this first draft. So now we can fully dive into exam studying.

I do not know what I learned from this experience. Probably most about the absurdity of the human condition – how some people can simply be oblivious and not care. It is truly fascinating. Either way, that's enough for this rant!

This Week's Suggestions:

🎶 "Et Ta Mère" by Zoufris Maracas:

Recently been on that French lyric vibe. This song is simple yet so efficient, it plays on the meaning of words and has fun with itself. Have a listen if you have a moment!

Hope you had a better weekend than me!