whew

and just like that, my first course in grad school is over.

sigh. talk about baptism of fire. but knowing me, i'm grinnin' ear to ear after all the chaos and the cramming.

not really.

i just realized, at this age that i do not like group work. scrap that, i think i disliked group work way back in college. i was just reminded by how much i disliked it when i had to do a group project for my class.

see, back in high school, bossy ol' me loved group work because i was always the leader. i thrived in group work. big group work, and mostly of co-curricular nature. i loved theater production. loved loved loved it. still do.

come college, i mostly chilled and concentrated on my studies. i started looking after my own back. for one, i disliked user-friendly classmates in college who refuse to take their own notes and ask me if they can just photocopy mine. solution? i used neon pens. they don't come out when you photocopy them in the cheap ass photocopiers we had in jumanities.

anyway, back to grad school, so we had to make a slide show. i was an eager beaver to get an A on this class so i said to meself that i will do well with this group project. turns out my group mates were a bunch of eager beavers as well. two can't seem to get enough of extra work. i backed off because i didn't want to add on to the club, so i said, okay i'll do what's left.

anyway, long story short. we crammed for this project and almost didn't meet the deadline. i was hit by my two groupies because they felt that i didn't give in as much time for the project.

okay, i respect that.

but wait, here's my take on it:

say for example, that in a group of 4 we all had our piece of the puzzle to do. my working style has been. okay, delegate, work individually, and reconvene at a given time.

groupie 1 gave me two other tasks aside from my part : to write the intro and conclusion of the slide show. did ideliver? yes, i did, and in a timely manner.

i do not see any benefits of staying up late, losing sleep and staying online all night just to wait for one another to finish. come on, we all have other things to do. besides, the number of hours spent does not necessarily amount to the same amount or level of productivity. sleep deprivation is bad for the brain cells. this we all just read in this month's class. and then there's the phone. you know...

if there's something strange ... in your neighborhood... who you gonna call?

with a fulltime job, tutoring 3 kids on the side, an apartment to maintain and this grad class to think of, the weekends are the only days i can run my errands. i tutor on the weekends as well. my groupies all stayed by the computer all weekend. i stayed online for a certain number of hours. i slept at 2 am on friday night, and 12 am, saturday.

when i had to go to bestbuy to return an electronic on its final day for return, on saturday, i asked my groupies a couple of hours before i had to go that i'll have to run errands, and that to PLEASE give me a call if they need me so i can rush back home or find internet connection somewhere so i can do what i need to do for the group.

groupie 1 said, they'll be fine. so said "cool."

a few hours later, when i logged on, i got an offline message from groupie 1 that groupie 2 had to revise my reference page because i didn't follow the prescribed APA format. ooops, my bad, but she did not have to do that, that's my job. so i asked 1 if he tried calling me, because i was obssessing at my phone looking at it every 30 minutes to make sure i have a signa,l should any of them need me. 1 said he tried calling me, i didn't answer. i told him i had no missed call. i checked the number with him. he got my area code wrong. he was calling maryland for procopio's sake.

and yes, i felt bad for that.

but in the end what can i do? just hope that things get better next time and get things straight about working habits from the get go.

the good thing about them though is this : they really are great people. and i'm glad we're still friends.

now if only i can still get an A in this class.