Working with The Fortunate Travelers: Reflection

As part of our Journey in Literature Class, we were assigned to a group of students to work with during the whole semester. I believe that part of the experience consisted on not choosing your "team mates", but rather getting assigned to a group with bunch of strangers. Meeting new people is always scary, but when you have to work with strangers to earn a good grade it becomes ten times more frighting. At first I was a little disappointed because none of my few friends in the class were in my group. I was scared to meet new people and nervous to see if I would fit in. I didn't realize at the moment that this was an enormous opportunity to grow personally and academically. 

My first encounter with my group was a little formal, but a good start. During this opportunity we all shared our names and contact information. We also came up with our name: Fortunate Travelers. As time progressed we started talking to each other through messages and in the classroom. We started to act a little friendlier with each other and talk about other things besides the work assigned in class. Having so many different people in a group means having a huge amount of different ideas and suggestions. Coping with the fact that we each had to compromise our ideas to fit this mixture of thoughts gave me a little stress, since I'm a little control freak. With time I learned that everyone in the group had great ideas and that sometimes letting things go is better. As one of the note takers I still had a little of that control, but gave the other group members power in the decision making process. 

Our final group oral presentation about Carl Jung's travel to North Africa is the best lesson I will take with me. We all wanted to get better grades, so our goal was the same. We decided to meet up during the weekend and work on our presentation so we would make no errors. After many laughs and joking around, we got to work as a group. Everyone shared their own interpretations of the text and we wrote down a analytical written work. We also talked about what we were going to say during the presentation and prepared a poster to visually help our class discussion. I believe during this activity I learned a huge lesson. Working in a group and letting go of my control issues makes the work load seem smaller and ideas flow easier. We got the work done in no time and we made a good presentation in class. 

Working with a group is something that during college is done very little. I had never worked in the university with a group of more than 3 people. Being set in a group of 6 members was a little nerve racking since I didn't know how things would go. In the end, we learned how to effectively divide the workload without being unfair to each other. We taught each other lessons about respect, opportunities and how to listen to others. This experience was very enriching for me and I have no bad comments about it. I hope everyone gets to work with a group for a class as I did. It is the chance to meet new people, work on your control issues and learn from other students! I owe this wonderful experience to Alessandra, Manuel, Antonio, Liane and Hector. It was a pleasure to work along side with you guys.

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