THIS VS THAT

INDIVIDUAL WORK

Working individually is the way to go. Sure teamwork is the dream work, but not when you have a shit group. 

Honestly, you could go to the gym to grow your shoulders, or similarly, experience the same amount of growth when you have to carry the team for the whole duration of the assignment. The plus about individual work? You don’t have to worry about hating your group, you can remain fairly confident that you will stay friends with your chums, (you’ll only hate yourself for leaving it to the last minute). 

There are a lot of efficient things in life ie. the Webprint service at uni and microwavable soups for dinner, but organising a time to meet to start work in the group chat is NOT one of them. The amount of time that gets spent writing messages in the chat is roughly the same amount of time it would take to complete the assignment on your own anyway. To add to that, the number of messages saying “oh nah sorry I’m not free this week or “can do next Tuesday maybe..” (even though they don’t work and have four hours of classes) are probably written enough times to hit the word count. 

The beauty of individual work is that you can completely be content to do as little or as much work on YOUR OWN assignment as you please, it’s your GPA and you can go about it as you please; A’s all the way or C’s to keep Studylink pleased (surely just enough to keep them convinced to keep paying you the weekly installments). 

Individual work leaves no room to be let down. At least if it gets to 3 am the morning of an assignment and you’ve consumed your weight in No-Doz, coffee and Red bulls, you more or less knew it was coming due to your own poor time management.

GROUP WORK

Alright, there’s a high chance that if you’re reading this, you’re a first year that hasn’t figured out that most students just skip to the back of Nexus to read the Blind Date. So, I’ll reward you with some solid advice early on 👌

Before you talk to one of the many jaded 3rd years moping around (usually seen in grey trackies, Adidas scuffs and sporting massive bags under their eyes) don’t let them corrupt you! They’ll probably tell you that everything sucks, and most importantly, that group assignments are the worst. But don’t listen. They just didn’t know how to play the system.

If you get stuck with a shit group of people, group work will be ratchet. And most people just wait til it’s only the class rejects left and then haphazardly form some sort of Suicide Squad; no one wants to do any work and then come presentation day, it’s fucking chaos. So prepare early and scope out the right people; people you get along with and can talk to so you actually like doing work with them. It’ll make studying way more fun when you have friends to share an equal workload with.

OR… group up with the overachievers so they do all the work for you  – yeah they’ll hate group assignments from now on but that’s their fault for getting stuck with you.

Groups make everything easier. There’s a reason it took like 20 Marvel movies to finally kill Thanos (spoiler alert); those weak individuals needed a group to take him down. And imagine if Frodo had actually stuck with his fellowship a.k.a. his group, I’m sure he would have destroyed that ring way sooner with a bit more help. But no, that selfish, little bitch wanted to try to do it by himself. Being the hero doesn’t work; be a team player or an even better leech.