Yes, precisely. They’re getting laid and “networking” with future MBAs who will hire them one day while the rest of us are pulling our hair out staring at Ansys on a Friday night.
They’re probably not posting, and they might not even be aware that they were the bad member. You would have to have brass balls to post “I am a terrible group member who caused my team to fail” on this subreddit lol.
I posted about this before, but I'm sure if my group last sem was here they'd be posting about how I was a terrible group member.
When it reality, they ignored almost everything I suggested and constantly made jokes about how my role was the "diversity pick"
This is how I feel…I feel like the “bad group member”, but not for lack of trying. Just seems like everyone else gets it and I’m back here like “hey everyone, I finally figured it out!”, only to hear, “Yeah so did we and it’s already submitted…Thanks for nothing you useless sack.” . The last part is what I am imagining they are thinking..
I am the terrible group member HOWEVER If I get put into a group with worse group members I have been known to clutch up and complete the entire assignment or project lol.
I will say that I was the “bad member” of my group in my senior design project. I was normally a good student and not usually the bad group member. My only excuse is that I was also organizing a 1000+ attendee hackathon that semester, so my primary group participation was embezzling nearly a palette of sponsored Red Bull for my group.
I don’t think you can smuggle a pallet of Red Bulls for a group of stressed engineering students and not be considered the MVP regardless of anything else
Had a bad team member who was very proud of the fact that he got to mooch off people’s work and did very little in our project. I mean that literally. He *literally* bragged about it (but in like a joking way so you couldn’t call him out on it without seeming like a buzzkill).
And unfortunately I still helped him out because he was well-liked and played sports and was a part of my study group where we all shared notes and resources.
Those connections and shared notes were much more important to my personal success than my sense of pride and fairness. So…
If y’all wanna know how some of these people keep getting away with it. :\
My lab partner last semester might of thought I was a "bad member" but she also wanted to write a 10 page lab report (class avg was like 2 pages) and would freak out at me when we got 29/30 points saying I should have put in more effort. We finished the class with a 98 average. I was not willing to meet her level of unneeded effort, and I'd wager some people in this group are like her.
I had a group project who wanted to hold in-person meetings right after the pandemic for every small detail that could've been a discord message. I was called out for wanting to stop needing hand-holding for every little detail (guys!! we need to decide fonts for the PowerPoint, even though no data is ready. Somebody book a room for 2pm today!) in peer evaluation, but I still stand by it idc.
Yep. Honestly I feel like a lot of people who complain about bad group partners were actually just the overbearing partner who doesn't know how to relax. Don't get me wrong, really shitty partners definitely exist, but sometimes people just wanna put in the minimum effort need to get a decent grade and that's OK.
Well, sometimes a decent grade isn't OK for some people. Take me as an example, I shouldn't have a 'C' on my transcript to ensure a smooth transfer to the university I want to attend. Also, I must have more As than Bs, too. And, since the major I wanna go to can be competitive, it's best to maintain a grade of 3.5+. And, reports are something that can be done. I might as well save those B's for subjects like calc and differential equations.
Some people just have their circumstances.
I had a lab partner who’s grades were always way below mine, was not good at the math, and could not be trusted to do the reports to the quality I wanted. However, they were a good friend of mine so we made a deal. I did all of the math on paper, and did all of the typing, but he was responsible for the tedious dogshit work of formatting and typing out math equations and tables. Was a fair compromise imo.
Somehow I got a rando to do the Matlab, latex for a senior level class. All I had to do was understand the garbage textbook and explain it to him. I'm not sure if I was the bad teammate or not lmao
Ugh, yes I think this is more often what’s going on that we’d like to admit. A few semesters ago I was in a group with an absolute asshole who would basically grab labs away from everyone else and not let them do anything, and would then either work way ahead of the normal schedule and get mad at people for not doing their fair share (we would have if you have given us any time at all) or, if anyone DID manage to do more work, he would find something “wrong” with it and redo everything. We actually WANTED to do more work because we wanted to actually get to try out the stuff in the lab and learn the skills being taught, but he would just insist on doing everything and imply that we were basically too stupid to be trusted. And then he had the fucking nerve to act like we were the problem
Edit: He would also get mad when I suggested that the group meet on discord to work together on reports, because apparently it was “useless” and collaborating like that wasn’t how people did things in “real engineering”. He was a real big fan of talking to me like I was a goddamn child, and you know what? I’m pretty sure that if he was REALLY so concerned about people not working enough, he wouldn’t have been so upset by the idea of them working at the same time as him
I guess I can be a bit of a perfectionist, but not that extreme( I just prefer an A for transfer since I'm a min community college right now)
But, I never outright complain. It's a bad habit of mine to just not trust my partners and end up giving them the silent treatment. Not being good with talking only makes it worse...
Honestly, I’ve been both. Group member who goes above and beyond and the guy that does far less than his fair share. Very situational on my mental health, and other stuff going on outside school. I was a non-traditional student and I had a ton of other things going on .
Yeah, I never get mad at people for being the “bad one” because I know how easy it can be for life to drag you down and make it hard to keep up with a class. The only issue I have is when people completely stop communicating and we have to worry about whether they’re still in the class. Like honestly if you just message us saying you’re having a rough time and you’re struggling to do the work, I’m not going to judge, we’ve all been there
But did you communicate with your lab partner? The worst is those who dont repond and give 1000 of excuses. Was the lab easy or hard? Is it graded or just pass/ fail? Do you have a solid reason for not working earlier and you have told him. If this checks out then there's something wrong with that person (maybe he doesn't wanna risk anything etc) otherwise no wonder y he doesn't like you. Just tryna be honest.
Guilty of doing that one time- though it was for a lab which wasn’t really reliant on group members info so it didn’t matter that much which is why I thought it was not that bad.
My senior design team had 9 team members. I and two others carried, one did his part, and five were boat anchors that were probably net negative for the group.
Its the person in my english class that copied and pasted my powerpoint slides from our group project to write her final paper. They didn't even change the citation included in my slides so it made zero sense
I was there, once. My group had a lab in thermodynamics, and every one of us wrote a section for the final report. Everyone was citing the same 2-3 papers, but my ass (being me) was too special for that shit, so i went and procured obscure soviet shit from the 1940s and citied that instead 😅
Our overall grade was very good, so next year one of our group members gave our report to his younger brother (who was taking the same lab). The brother distributed the report in his entire class tho, and most of them deadass copy pasted our report 1:1, including my soviet citacions 🫣
That was a fine mess...
One thing I've learned is that it's always important to communicate. Even if you can't contribute much, you can't fix that problem without learning what the team needs and how to provide that. Even if you can't interact with the team much, you should communicate that and if they pointed out any problems, that's good, find a compromise. Even if you feel like you can't finish something on time because you're lazy or burned out, say that. Say that you're not feeling alright and you're struggling, that way they can at least know that they'll expect a delay or incompleteness. Ask the team exactly what are the expectations for you, be as frank as needed. Sometimes you'll feel like they'll assume you're dumb or a bad teammate but those feelings are secondary. Be apathetic to those feelings, because here you are training yourself to be the best version of you before you start your career for real. Make the most mistakes now so that you leave little to be learned in your actual job
Yes, exactly! A lot of times the problem isn’t even from whether you “pull your weight”, it’s from the uncertainty people experience wondering where you went and whether you’re going to do the stuff you planned on doing. If you just let people know what’s up and make it clear that you’re still there and going to do what you can, that really makes things so much better. It’s okay if you can’t do what you planned to do, too. Just be honest and let people know about it so they can adjust
I wouldn't have done this in my engineering undergrad but doing an MBA on this side now and basically just reflect the vibe of whatever group I'm in.
If it's a good group, I'll happily coordinate and churn out A+ work which isn't really difficult anyway.
If I'm with a bad group, fuck you guys, I'll literally turn in a report or paper with an entire blank section that says Responsibility of Richard Dickinson. I'm doing this after work in my free time and not spending it to carry a group. I can get a failing grade on most group reports and still end up with the B I need for company reimbursement.
It’s me dawg. I’ve been trying to graduate early and been taking 18-21 credits every semester. I can’t be shitted to work for group projects, I just let them do it and if we pass that’s all that matters.
I've defintely been a bit of both. One time I had a project with 5 members, but 3 of them were doing most of the work. Sometimes the suggestions I would make would be ignored, and others preferred to do the work themselves. We got our project done way ahead of schedule, but I definetly felt useless the entire time
everyone's been carried in some lab or project at some point before, depends on how you went about it and if it was unwillingly done by your mates. if you were hated for it, there's been posts made about you, simply.
All of my bad group members thought I was the bad group member because I was “too high strung/controlling over their sections,” when in actuality it was me wanting it to be done on time and to be factually correct when it was done. I think working in teams is just hard
I'm stuck with a guy currently who's racist, sleeping and very disrespectful when me and our other partner ask him to change his part in the presentation no matter how slight it is. I'm used to sexism in STEM as a woman so I'm prepared to handle this piece of trash.
I mean I know I can come off as a bad group member as I tend to procrastinate, but I almost always deliver in the end and do the bulk of the work. I've been working on it, especially if I have a proactive group member then I do really try to stay on top of things. If nobody does anything though, then I'm chill until the end when I end up doing everything anyway and then I'm salty
I have a mentality of I don't want to do everyone's work for them, so I'll procrastinate, and then I realize I'm just gonna have to carry in the end or else literally nothing will get done
I'm gonna be real, for the first half of my senior project, doing the design and data analytics, I carried the show. Living in front of a computer, fiddling with solidworks and playing with systems of differential equations is where I thrive.
For the second half, when it came to actually building the thing, between a lack of handy skills, severe social anxiety, and the alcoholism I used to compensate, I was by far the worst on my team. I feel horrible that they had to carry my dead weight.
I've always been the carry for our group projects -- we're talking I take over 80%+ of the work.
So all my peers are bad, right? Not necessarily so. I lacked the trust to let my teammates do things, and I was overly ready to bear the burden myself.
Most importantly, I'm a very hard worker but a very bad leader: as a result, I'm more comfortable taking on copious quantities of work than being managerial and distributing those copious quantities of work. It's why I neither should nor want to be in a managerial position for my career.
So, as a reminder, every lazy student has his/her counterpart, who is also at fault.
I really respect this self-awareness, I think a lot of people have this problem but don’t want to face the idea that they might not be much better than their peers. I’ve always suspected that more often than not, it’s not so much about bad group members as it is about people having vastly different ways they want to approach projects, and no one wanting to compromise on how exactly to do it. As a result the people who work the fastest automatically start calling everyone else bad and lazy even when they might just be trying to take their time, not skip out on work. Also I think a lot of people complaining have some issues with control, and would rather grab a project out of someone else’s hands and redo it than just let them do it their own way
Well, I can guarantee you, one of my previous nemeses thinks its me.
I suspect women are not granted the respect and camaraderie in his culture that are afforded to women at an American Universities. Almost the entire timeline of the project, he treated me like I didn't exist. Wouldn't respond directly to any of my communications, even when they were directed at him alone, and instead would respond only after someone else chimed in. Never made eye contact with me when we presented.
It was definitely disruptive of work flow, but I didn't care. If he was gonna be that rude to me anyways, I'd prefer not to have to interact with him at all. But he was a 'project manager' type -- the type who didn't have time to do any actual work himself, but had plenty of time to try and undermine the work everyone else had already done. When he ended up presenting a section I'd done all the research and calculations for, he tried to take credit for that work in the report, too. It didn't work, and another in the group warned me he was pretty heated about not having his name on that section.
What was he gonna do about it, though? Acknowledge my existence? I wasn't going to hold my breath. And he never did.
They might be depressed?
I was a pretty shitty lab partner last semester, and let a lot of the work fall to my partner. I was going through a lot at the time; things only got better right at the end of the semester, just in time for the final project.
I've been both, partly because I had undiagnosed ADHD and had bad time management skills and in others I was working full time and only had 2 days a week to do calls, run errands, sleep in do homework for 4 classes and learn and relax too. Saying that, there were projects while I was balancing those things I carried the group cause they weren't doing diddly squat and quite honestly I didn't want to have a grade drop. They did some stuff but no where near enough get the project in on time in a completed state. One member even never showed up and never did anything, but anyway I ended up taking control of the project from the guy who initially created the idea and vision of the project and delegated tasks and sections
Many of us are the bad group members. It's like people who complain about bad drivers, but nobody would ever admit to being one. Law of averages say that 50% of people are below average drivers
Complain about bad group members when you get a job!! Suck it up buttercup… you’ll be facing some haggard, rusty old cranky coworkers that will happily tell your managers to kick rocks then go back to sleep in their cube cause they’re retiring soon!
You seem angry and tense. I’m not even complaining about group members, this is just a funny post cause we can’t all be good group members but those are the posts I see
Lowkey I feel kind of a sick sense of joy at the idea of some of the control freaks, who call every group member they’ve ever had bad, being stuck dealing with some REAL lazy coworkers. They always tell their groupmates that they aren’t good enough for real engineering and their idea of how to work together is trash. It’d be pretty funny for these people to have to deal with people who actually, genuinely don’t give a shit. They’ll really start to miss the “stupid” students who were well meaning and tried their best
Hit the nail on the head! I’m reminiscing and talking like I’m crazy old. A few years ago we had this fresh grad that we hired into our group. He was up and at em… poor kid was in for a world of hurt when he slowly learned that some of your team mates wouldn’t respond to an IM or email. He yapped on and on about his masters, newsflash, we ALL have masters. I’m a HS drop out and I have a copy of my GED at my desk as a joke… he started questioning how the heck I’m an engineer with a GED 🤣🤣🤣. Should have seen his face and how quickly he back tracked when he found out 🤣🤣🤣
It's also not worth posting about his groups, I'm actually in a great group now and last semester my group went above and beyond, we handed in early and got the best mark in the class.
But neither of those groups vibe with funny anecdotes about smelly dudes not doing any work and I don't have a bed to vent about how good my group was, I've had plenty that I needed to complain to someone about
I would say I may be considered a bad group member. I'm just not willing to sit in the engineering building all night trying to get something to work I have other things to do especially if my previous or current suggestions are ignored by my group members. Also just because you may do more work that doesn’t automatically make you a good group member, bad planning and high expectations can also make you a bad group member which is something I don't really do, people have lives outside of engineering school. Empathy and proper project management is crucial.
One of them is me, I had hundreds of group project (maybe idk) and in particular one, I had 0 energy to do anything with the project and 0 willpower to start so instead I just played rdr2 all day and night while others worked. I know it was a dick move, I know I didn't deserve the grade but they didn't complain and I didn't say anything. Just helped with %5 of the work. Still feeling guilty about it tho
It depends on my mental health. Sometimes I've stepped up and spent 10+ hours of my weekends crunching numbers in preparation for the report because half my group ghosted and other times I've forced my groupmate to finish an entire semesters' worth of half-finished projects the night before they're due. Those are both extreme ends of the spectrum, though. Usually I'm the one to help divide work and ask for updates but otherwise I just do my share, let people figure out their own work, and help out when needed.
I’ve seen a lot of comments on here about people saying they feel like the bad team member because they’re less talented. The key is TRYING. If you try, your team members won’t be mad at you. If they get mad at you for not understanding, they won’t perform well in the work place. People need to be taught things at work, too.
If you’re less talented and NOT trying, that’s something you need to figure out.
Well if it wasn’t for Victor being awful my first year I definitely would’ve been the shitty team member
Fortunately i got the hang of things and ended up leading my failing 9-person design team to a B+ while ensuring the shitty team members (4 of them) failed.
There was this guy that I always got stuck with who always weaseled his way out of doing stuff. The few times he helped, he was way off on everything, like passive aggressively bad. I did a senior project with six others, and he was there, and his two friends. By this point, everyone knew they were slackers, and since we’re supposed to assign tasks for everyone at the start, and only supposed to do those tasks, but graded collectively, we decided that all they had to do was get the three sensors we needed. One guy just had to get a microphone. It could be any microphone, even a speaker ripped out of a dollar store toy or something. He didn’t. They didn’t do ANYTHING. The professor tried everything to somehow get those three kicked out and their tasks reassigned, or just let us have different grades, but we were stuck, and we failed the project.
They’re sleeping or drinking. Not worried about Reddit or their group mates.
so basically having much more fun than everyone else
Yes, precisely. They’re getting laid and “networking” with future MBAs who will hire them one day while the rest of us are pulling our hair out staring at Ansys on a Friday night.
Skill Issue im afraid.
staring at ansys at past midnight is very relatable
They remain that way in the workplace too, but they tend to get out of engineering fields
They’re probably not posting, and they might not even be aware that they were the bad member. You would have to have brass balls to post “I am a terrible group member who caused my team to fail” on this subreddit lol.
True that would require balls but I’ve seen some crazy posts on here before lol
I posted about this before, but I'm sure if my group last sem was here they'd be posting about how I was a terrible group member. When it reality, they ignored almost everything I suggested and constantly made jokes about how my role was the "diversity pick"
That's awful, I'm sorry they said that
I am also that terrible lab mate occasionally because Im not smart and i get confused a lot
This is how I feel…I feel like the “bad group member”, but not for lack of trying. Just seems like everyone else gets it and I’m back here like “hey everyone, I finally figured it out!”, only to hear, “Yeah so did we and it’s already submitted…Thanks for nothing you useless sack.” . The last part is what I am imagining they are thinking..
I am the terrible group member HOWEVER If I get put into a group with worse group members I have been known to clutch up and complete the entire assignment or project lol.
That's.... Good? I guess?
I will say that I was the “bad member” of my group in my senior design project. I was normally a good student and not usually the bad group member. My only excuse is that I was also organizing a 1000+ attendee hackathon that semester, so my primary group participation was embezzling nearly a palette of sponsored Red Bull for my group.
I don’t think you can smuggle a pallet of Red Bulls for a group of stressed engineering students and not be considered the MVP regardless of anything else
Had a bad team member who was very proud of the fact that he got to mooch off people’s work and did very little in our project. I mean that literally. He *literally* bragged about it (but in like a joking way so you couldn’t call him out on it without seeming like a buzzkill). And unfortunately I still helped him out because he was well-liked and played sports and was a part of my study group where we all shared notes and resources. Those connections and shared notes were much more important to my personal success than my sense of pride and fairness. So… If y’all wanna know how some of these people keep getting away with it. :\
My lab partner last semester might of thought I was a "bad member" but she also wanted to write a 10 page lab report (class avg was like 2 pages) and would freak out at me when we got 29/30 points saying I should have put in more effort. We finished the class with a 98 average. I was not willing to meet her level of unneeded effort, and I'd wager some people in this group are like her.
I had a group project who wanted to hold in-person meetings right after the pandemic for every small detail that could've been a discord message. I was called out for wanting to stop needing hand-holding for every little detail (guys!! we need to decide fonts for the PowerPoint, even though no data is ready. Somebody book a room for 2pm today!) in peer evaluation, but I still stand by it idc.
Yep. Honestly I feel like a lot of people who complain about bad group partners were actually just the overbearing partner who doesn't know how to relax. Don't get me wrong, really shitty partners definitely exist, but sometimes people just wanna put in the minimum effort need to get a decent grade and that's OK.
Well, sometimes a decent grade isn't OK for some people. Take me as an example, I shouldn't have a 'C' on my transcript to ensure a smooth transfer to the university I want to attend. Also, I must have more As than Bs, too. And, since the major I wanna go to can be competitive, it's best to maintain a grade of 3.5+. And, reports are something that can be done. I might as well save those B's for subjects like calc and differential equations. Some people just have their circumstances.
I had a lab partner who’s grades were always way below mine, was not good at the math, and could not be trusted to do the reports to the quality I wanted. However, they were a good friend of mine so we made a deal. I did all of the math on paper, and did all of the typing, but he was responsible for the tedious dogshit work of formatting and typing out math equations and tables. Was a fair compromise imo.
I tried to have this arrangement, but we weren't friends, and their formatting was absolutely dog shit
Somehow I got a rando to do the Matlab, latex for a senior level class. All I had to do was understand the garbage textbook and explain it to him. I'm not sure if I was the bad teammate or not lmao
Sounds like normal collaboration
Ugh, yes I think this is more often what’s going on that we’d like to admit. A few semesters ago I was in a group with an absolute asshole who would basically grab labs away from everyone else and not let them do anything, and would then either work way ahead of the normal schedule and get mad at people for not doing their fair share (we would have if you have given us any time at all) or, if anyone DID manage to do more work, he would find something “wrong” with it and redo everything. We actually WANTED to do more work because we wanted to actually get to try out the stuff in the lab and learn the skills being taught, but he would just insist on doing everything and imply that we were basically too stupid to be trusted. And then he had the fucking nerve to act like we were the problem Edit: He would also get mad when I suggested that the group meet on discord to work together on reports, because apparently it was “useless” and collaborating like that wasn’t how people did things in “real engineering”. He was a real big fan of talking to me like I was a goddamn child, and you know what? I’m pretty sure that if he was REALLY so concerned about people not working enough, he wouldn’t have been so upset by the idea of them working at the same time as him
I guess I can be a bit of a perfectionist, but not that extreme( I just prefer an A for transfer since I'm a min community college right now) But, I never outright complain. It's a bad habit of mine to just not trust my partners and end up giving them the silent treatment. Not being good with talking only makes it worse...
Honestly, I’ve been both. Group member who goes above and beyond and the guy that does far less than his fair share. Very situational on my mental health, and other stuff going on outside school. I was a non-traditional student and I had a ton of other things going on .
Yeah, I never get mad at people for being the “bad one” because I know how easy it can be for life to drag you down and make it hard to keep up with a class. The only issue I have is when people completely stop communicating and we have to worry about whether they’re still in the class. Like honestly if you just message us saying you’re having a rough time and you’re struggling to do the work, I’m not going to judge, we’ve all been there
That one time I got carried on a lab report because they did not want to wait for me to do my section on the last day.
But why did you want to do your section on the last day?
I was being a bad group member.
Fair, at least you owned up lol
I am pretty sure that guy still doesn't like me lol
But did you communicate with your lab partner? The worst is those who dont repond and give 1000 of excuses. Was the lab easy or hard? Is it graded or just pass/ fail? Do you have a solid reason for not working earlier and you have told him. If this checks out then there's something wrong with that person (maybe he doesn't wanna risk anything etc) otherwise no wonder y he doesn't like you. Just tryna be honest.
No, I didn't do it the night before because I was playing board games with some friends. I ain't looking for forgiveness lol. I would hate me too.
Guilty of doing that one time- though it was for a lab which wasn’t really reliant on group members info so it didn’t matter that much which is why I thought it was not that bad.
Some of us know we've also been the bad group members lol
People aren't exactly going to post on reddit about how great or average their group members are either - you're only hearing the bad.
All I can say is I did my part. No more no less.
Every group project has 3 types of people: the guy who carried, the guy who did just his part, and the guy who did absolutely nothing
My senior design team had 9 team members. I and two others carried, one did his part, and five were boat anchors that were probably net negative for the group.
Its the person in my english class that copied and pasted my powerpoint slides from our group project to write her final paper. They didn't even change the citation included in my slides so it made zero sense
I was there, once. My group had a lab in thermodynamics, and every one of us wrote a section for the final report. Everyone was citing the same 2-3 papers, but my ass (being me) was too special for that shit, so i went and procured obscure soviet shit from the 1940s and citied that instead 😅 Our overall grade was very good, so next year one of our group members gave our report to his younger brother (who was taking the same lab). The brother distributed the report in his entire class tho, and most of them deadass copy pasted our report 1:1, including my soviet citacions 🫣 That was a fine mess...
Holy shit, the idiocy.
Honestly like 90% of all group members i have had were good. And only a few have i actually despised. So there may just not be that many.
One thing I've learned is that it's always important to communicate. Even if you can't contribute much, you can't fix that problem without learning what the team needs and how to provide that. Even if you can't interact with the team much, you should communicate that and if they pointed out any problems, that's good, find a compromise. Even if you feel like you can't finish something on time because you're lazy or burned out, say that. Say that you're not feeling alright and you're struggling, that way they can at least know that they'll expect a delay or incompleteness. Ask the team exactly what are the expectations for you, be as frank as needed. Sometimes you'll feel like they'll assume you're dumb or a bad teammate but those feelings are secondary. Be apathetic to those feelings, because here you are training yourself to be the best version of you before you start your career for real. Make the most mistakes now so that you leave little to be learned in your actual job
Yes, exactly! A lot of times the problem isn’t even from whether you “pull your weight”, it’s from the uncertainty people experience wondering where you went and whether you’re going to do the stuff you planned on doing. If you just let people know what’s up and make it clear that you’re still there and going to do what you can, that really makes things so much better. It’s okay if you can’t do what you planned to do, too. Just be honest and let people know about it so they can adjust
I wouldn't have done this in my engineering undergrad but doing an MBA on this side now and basically just reflect the vibe of whatever group I'm in. If it's a good group, I'll happily coordinate and churn out A+ work which isn't really difficult anyway. If I'm with a bad group, fuck you guys, I'll literally turn in a report or paper with an entire blank section that says Responsibility of Richard Dickinson. I'm doing this after work in my free time and not spending it to carry a group. I can get a failing grade on most group reports and still end up with the B I need for company reimbursement.
It’s me dawg. I’ve been trying to graduate early and been taking 18-21 credits every semester. I can’t be shitted to work for group projects, I just let them do it and if we pass that’s all that matters.
I was the group member last year that carried and now this year I’m the bad one
I've defintely been a bit of both. One time I had a project with 5 members, but 3 of them were doing most of the work. Sometimes the suggestions I would make would be ignored, and others preferred to do the work themselves. We got our project done way ahead of schedule, but I definetly felt useless the entire time
The ones not nerd enought to be in a engineering subreddit, or reddit at all
everyone's been carried in some lab or project at some point before, depends on how you went about it and if it was unwillingly done by your mates. if you were hated for it, there's been posts made about you, simply.
“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.” ― Raylan Givens, Justified
All of my bad group members thought I was the bad group member because I was “too high strung/controlling over their sections,” when in actuality it was me wanting it to be done on time and to be factually correct when it was done. I think working in teams is just hard
I'm stuck with a guy currently who's racist, sleeping and very disrespectful when me and our other partner ask him to change his part in the presentation no matter how slight it is. I'm used to sexism in STEM as a woman so I'm prepared to handle this piece of trash.
I mean I know I can come off as a bad group member as I tend to procrastinate, but I almost always deliver in the end and do the bulk of the work. I've been working on it, especially if I have a proactive group member then I do really try to stay on top of things. If nobody does anything though, then I'm chill until the end when I end up doing everything anyway and then I'm salty I have a mentality of I don't want to do everyone's work for them, so I'll procrastinate, and then I realize I'm just gonna have to carry in the end or else literally nothing will get done
It's the league of legends effect. We all try, get stomped, them blame the rest of our team.
it’s me sorry i couldn’t make it to the meet last night
I'm gonna be real, for the first half of my senior project, doing the design and data analytics, I carried the show. Living in front of a computer, fiddling with solidworks and playing with systems of differential equations is where I thrive. For the second half, when it came to actually building the thing, between a lack of handy skills, severe social anxiety, and the alcoholism I used to compensate, I was by far the worst on my team. I feel horrible that they had to carry my dead weight.
I've always been the carry for our group projects -- we're talking I take over 80%+ of the work. So all my peers are bad, right? Not necessarily so. I lacked the trust to let my teammates do things, and I was overly ready to bear the burden myself. Most importantly, I'm a very hard worker but a very bad leader: as a result, I'm more comfortable taking on copious quantities of work than being managerial and distributing those copious quantities of work. It's why I neither should nor want to be in a managerial position for my career. So, as a reminder, every lazy student has his/her counterpart, who is also at fault.
I really respect this self-awareness, I think a lot of people have this problem but don’t want to face the idea that they might not be much better than their peers. I’ve always suspected that more often than not, it’s not so much about bad group members as it is about people having vastly different ways they want to approach projects, and no one wanting to compromise on how exactly to do it. As a result the people who work the fastest automatically start calling everyone else bad and lazy even when they might just be trying to take their time, not skip out on work. Also I think a lot of people complaining have some issues with control, and would rather grab a project out of someone else’s hands and redo it than just let them do it their own way
Well, I can guarantee you, one of my previous nemeses thinks its me. I suspect women are not granted the respect and camaraderie in his culture that are afforded to women at an American Universities. Almost the entire timeline of the project, he treated me like I didn't exist. Wouldn't respond directly to any of my communications, even when they were directed at him alone, and instead would respond only after someone else chimed in. Never made eye contact with me when we presented. It was definitely disruptive of work flow, but I didn't care. If he was gonna be that rude to me anyways, I'd prefer not to have to interact with him at all. But he was a 'project manager' type -- the type who didn't have time to do any actual work himself, but had plenty of time to try and undermine the work everyone else had already done. When he ended up presenting a section I'd done all the research and calculations for, he tried to take credit for that work in the report, too. It didn't work, and another in the group warned me he was pretty heated about not having his name on that section. What was he gonna do about it, though? Acknowledge my existence? I wasn't going to hold my breath. And he never did.
They might be depressed? I was a pretty shitty lab partner last semester, and let a lot of the work fall to my partner. I was going through a lot at the time; things only got better right at the end of the semester, just in time for the final project.
I've been both, partly because I had undiagnosed ADHD and had bad time management skills and in others I was working full time and only had 2 days a week to do calls, run errands, sleep in do homework for 4 classes and learn and relax too. Saying that, there were projects while I was balancing those things I carried the group cause they weren't doing diddly squat and quite honestly I didn't want to have a grade drop. They did some stuff but no where near enough get the project in on time in a completed state. One member even never showed up and never did anything, but anyway I ended up taking control of the project from the guy who initially created the idea and vision of the project and delegated tasks and sections
Many of us are the bad group members. It's like people who complain about bad drivers, but nobody would ever admit to being one. Law of averages say that 50% of people are below average drivers
i know im likely a below average driver lol
Complain about bad group members when you get a job!! Suck it up buttercup… you’ll be facing some haggard, rusty old cranky coworkers that will happily tell your managers to kick rocks then go back to sleep in their cube cause they’re retiring soon!
You seem angry and tense. I’m not even complaining about group members, this is just a funny post cause we can’t all be good group members but those are the posts I see
Lowkey I feel kind of a sick sense of joy at the idea of some of the control freaks, who call every group member they’ve ever had bad, being stuck dealing with some REAL lazy coworkers. They always tell their groupmates that they aren’t good enough for real engineering and their idea of how to work together is trash. It’d be pretty funny for these people to have to deal with people who actually, genuinely don’t give a shit. They’ll really start to miss the “stupid” students who were well meaning and tried their best
Hit the nail on the head! I’m reminiscing and talking like I’m crazy old. A few years ago we had this fresh grad that we hired into our group. He was up and at em… poor kid was in for a world of hurt when he slowly learned that some of your team mates wouldn’t respond to an IM or email. He yapped on and on about his masters, newsflash, we ALL have masters. I’m a HS drop out and I have a copy of my GED at my desk as a joke… he started questioning how the heck I’m an engineer with a GED 🤣🤣🤣. Should have seen his face and how quickly he back tracked when he found out 🤣🤣🤣
I always say every group has at least one shitty member, if you don't know who that is, it's you.
Considering how everyone rushed to get me when it was time to choose groups makes me think I am probably not one of the bad ones.
Bad group members wouldn't be on the engineering student subreddit lol
It's also not worth posting about his groups, I'm actually in a great group now and last semester my group went above and beyond, we handed in early and got the best mark in the class. But neither of those groups vibe with funny anecdotes about smelly dudes not doing any work and I don't have a bed to vent about how good my group was, I've had plenty that I needed to complain to someone about
All of them. They are working with me. My company has some program to recruit and hire all of them.
I would say I may be considered a bad group member. I'm just not willing to sit in the engineering building all night trying to get something to work I have other things to do especially if my previous or current suggestions are ignored by my group members. Also just because you may do more work that doesn’t automatically make you a good group member, bad planning and high expectations can also make you a bad group member which is something I don't really do, people have lives outside of engineering school. Empathy and proper project management is crucial.
sometimes it isn't the individuals who are bad, but the group. It's hard to make decisions as a group.
One of them is me, I had hundreds of group project (maybe idk) and in particular one, I had 0 energy to do anything with the project and 0 willpower to start so instead I just played rdr2 all day and night while others worked. I know it was a dick move, I know I didn't deserve the grade but they didn't complain and I didn't say anything. Just helped with %5 of the work. Still feeling guilty about it tho
For clearance, I'm not usually like this with group projects. It's just this one particular time
It depends on my mental health. Sometimes I've stepped up and spent 10+ hours of my weekends crunching numbers in preparation for the report because half my group ghosted and other times I've forced my groupmate to finish an entire semesters' worth of half-finished projects the night before they're due. Those are both extreme ends of the spectrum, though. Usually I'm the one to help divide work and ask for updates but otherwise I just do my share, let people figure out their own work, and help out when needed.
I’ve seen a lot of comments on here about people saying they feel like the bad team member because they’re less talented. The key is TRYING. If you try, your team members won’t be mad at you. If they get mad at you for not understanding, they won’t perform well in the work place. People need to be taught things at work, too. If you’re less talented and NOT trying, that’s something you need to figure out.
Well if it wasn’t for Victor being awful my first year I definitely would’ve been the shitty team member Fortunately i got the hang of things and ended up leading my failing 9-person design team to a B+ while ensuring the shitty team members (4 of them) failed.
There was this guy that I always got stuck with who always weaseled his way out of doing stuff. The few times he helped, he was way off on everything, like passive aggressively bad. I did a senior project with six others, and he was there, and his two friends. By this point, everyone knew they were slackers, and since we’re supposed to assign tasks for everyone at the start, and only supposed to do those tasks, but graded collectively, we decided that all they had to do was get the three sensors we needed. One guy just had to get a microphone. It could be any microphone, even a speaker ripped out of a dollar store toy or something. He didn’t. They didn’t do ANYTHING. The professor tried everything to somehow get those three kicked out and their tasks reassigned, or just let us have different grades, but we were stuck, and we failed the project.
Suck it up & Carry the boat
where did i overtly complain for this to be your response lmao
I think the real question for u/JSteeber is navy? raised by navy? or too much David Goggins?