Weekly lesson: When the professor assigns group work, no matter who you work with, unless you are with your best friend or a very attractive member of the sex that you are attracted to…you will suffer. You will shake your fists at the sky in valiant attempts to not smack them across your fellow members’ faces. And if you are anything like me, you will sit there until 5 o’clock in the morning, fixing everyone else’s part of the assignment.

The next day, you’ll wobble into class, delirious from exhaustion and suppressed frustration, and when they ask you if there were any problems with the assignment, you’ll just go:

Seriously, there are so many things wrong with group work, I don’t even know why professors still assign it. Building cooperation? More like the person who’s doing most of the work asks everyone for the proper way to spell their names and they give it. Learning to listen to everyone’s ideas and compromise? HAHAHA. More like the person who’s doing most of the work sits there and nods while the rest of the group explains their ideas for a blinged-out cover page and then that person goes:

And if you’re the group leader? HA. You might as well sign over your sanity on a  glittering dotted line. I mean, between spamming one member’s phone because that person conveniently did not show up to our meeting and fielding yet another disagreement between two other members about the proper way to phrase some particular sentence, quite frankly, I am one more group member away from turning into her:

But that’s not just the college way of life, that’s life in general. You’re going to meet people who make you wish you could vaporize them with your silent glare and you’re going to meet people who make you question what you did to deserve their ridiculousness, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have to learn to put on a smile and let some things slide and if need be, pick up some slack. Is it fair? No. Can you alert the professor to the unfairness? Of course. But you still have to produce the assignment, whether that means spending your time tracking down MIA members and breathing down their neck while they hand you some half-done research or that means spending that time hunched in front of the computer and just doing their gosh darn research yourselves.

Countdown: 3 weeks. 3. MORE. WEEKS! Until summer bliss ~ and until I will no longer blog on QC Voices anymore…but that’s a little sad and we shouldn’t dwell on that right now so Summer Bliss it is!