Aside from military-style beds, group projects were the worst part of college.  I went to a college that fancied itself a business school, which mostly meant it produced loads of accountants, featured kids who knew the names of corporate CEOs and used self-evident business jargon like “it’s what happens going forward that’s going to drive this stock”.  More than anything, however, its position as a business college made it possible for nearly every professor to fit a group project into most curricula under the ruse that the World of Business would require a great deal of collaboration.  I would say that this premise was largely crap, but group projects were a great opportunity to deal with negotiating laziness, interpersonal conflict, and the throwing of plastic Sunkist bottles when certain group member returns from out of state where they were eternally visiting their boyfriend in the eleventh hour and complained that they had not been properly included in the preparation.   

In one example, I and four classmates were assigned the task of working with management from a wood pellet manufacturer to analyze its current situation, evaluate its prospects, and provide it with guidance about how to grow.  The fundamental problem the wood pellet company had was that it sold wood pellets, which had no use other than being burned in wood pellet stoves, which were expensive and unpopular given that crude oil was trading at $30 a barrel.  Since we couldn’t just say this, we had to engage in a fourteen-week charade of evaluating the company’s finances and prospects, developing a significant paper to explain our analysis and findings, and ultimately, put on a 30 –minute presentation to the company’s board about what we thought they should do.

My group for this project consisted of one girl with sometimes-green hair who wanted to be a potter and was as in her element at our business-leaning college as Pat Buchanan at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, a short guy with a permanent smug and an under bite who only spoke with his jaw elevated, the aforementioned lovesick girlfriend, and a very odd little guy with prominent facial hair who was want to wear a backpack with the suit he wore even when it wasn’t required.

During our first meeting, Facial Hair appointed himself group leader and suggested that we do a survey of homeowners to obtain information about why most people don’t have wood pellet stoves, and to learn what circumstances, short of a government mandate, might cause them to purchase one.  Most members of the group thought this was a decent idea except the Potter who mentioned that she was presently hung over, and thought she had plans to be out of town most of the weekends between then and the end of college, which was 34 weeks away.  Upon hearing of the Potter’s disinterest in participating in our study, Loyal Girlfriend shared that she “often” visited her boyfriend in New Hampshire and that she was happy to help as long as we never held group meetings during the weekend but that she would prefer that we simply divvy up tasks and then reunite shortly before the final date to mash them together in advance of the presentation.  I said I didn’t really care if we did a survey, but would prefer if we had a more consistently collaborative approach, which drew immediate “no” votes from everyone except Facial Hair.

Roughly ten days later, those of us who were around (out of state girlfriend said she couldn’t make it because she was going away for the weekend and really needed to finish a paper for another class before she left town and Potter was unreachable) sat in a dorm room to discuss the results of the survey, which had been executed by Facial Hair.  I don’t recall much of what the survey said but remember clearly that 80% of the meeting was dedicated to squabbling over the author’s insistence upon the prominent and repeated use of the word “gleaned” in his summary of findings, which seemed annoying and unnecessary, particularly to Under Bite.

Over the next twelve weeks the three of us who cared about getting a good grade worked diligently on the various elements of the project which turned out to require significantly less effort than dealing with the less interested members of our group who, consistent with my experience in every single group project I’ve ever done, showed up two days before the work was due and demanded that they be given equal responsibility for the presentation and content and threatened to inform our professor if we were unwilling to allow them full participation. In the real world they would have been fired but since this was not the real world, we included them in ways that only partially exposed the fact that they had no idea what was going on. 

The subject company has flourished since our presentation.  The success could be the result of our keen insights, or of the fact that oil is 300% what it was on the date of our presentation.  There’s really no way to tell, but from what I can glean, it’s probably the price of oil.