3.8-11.10 – Group Meetings

This week has been pretty uneventful, however I feel the need to catalog its events. Overall, it could be characterized by group meetings. Monday consisted of 3 classes and a group meeting. The group meeting was rather short, due to the fact that all my other groups members appeared to have their minds elsewhere, and the primary focus was on how to divide the work up appropriately. Nevertheless the project was due the following day, so we needed to at least understand where we were all coming from.

Tuesday was interesting to say the least. I did get to sleep in a little, however birds are starting to chirp at 5:00am and waking me up in the process. Once I got up I headed into the city for my classes. Danish class was out of character because we had a substitute professor – my actual teacher and his wife just had a new baby boy before my trip to London and he is taking a short “paternity leave”. This new teacher is much more intense and speaks in Danish for most of the class. I can usually understand about half of what she says, but the fact that as a class we cannot figure out what she is asking or saying caused some minor setbacks. Overall, I don’t think this teaching style it bad; it is just completely different from what we are used to. She is only here I believe for this week though, so that class should go back to normal soon enough. I then had my leadership class, in which we gave the presentation/group project that I mentioned above. There are actually six different groups in the class and all of us were given the same assignment and prompt. Additionally, all the groups presented on Tuesday. Needless to say, the presentations got a little repetitive. Overall, I would say that our group’s presentation was average. We should get feedback on them on Friday, and I am interested to hear what our professor has to say. Following that class, I had another short group meeting (different group) to divide up sections of another project where we have a draft due on Monday. It was productive for what we needed to complete. This short, yet busy afternoon, ended with a surprise though. I received a package in the mail from Tory and Natalie! I was told to wait until my birthday (Monday) to open it, but it made my day all the same.

Wednesday was my highly productive day of the week. I took my time getting up, but then once awake I got right down to some homework, as well as some information that needed to be completed for my London Internship program this summer. I then had to go into the city around 4:00 because I had a group meeting (yet another group) to talk about a project that is due on Monday as well. I guess it was productive, yet again by dividing up sections so that it would be easier to work on separately. It is sort of annoying though, that I have about an hour-long commute for an hour-long meeting, and then have to turn around and head home. In all of my commuting though, I was able to complete all the necessary forms I needed to send in the next day for my internship.

Thursday mirrored the events of Monday. Consisting of my morning classes, getting some work done at DIS during my 5 hour break in between (which I was able to draft my section of one of the reports due on Monday), and my last class of the day. During that class, we were given time to meet with our groups to talk about our rough draft report due on Monday. Our group had a general idea of what we were doing, but we still talked about a few things regardless.

As you can tell this week is definitely overwhelmed by the planning for group projects. One of which is now complete and the other two will be done by Monday. All of this coordination was even more difficult because everyone had two or three projects they were juggling too. Additionally, a decent amount of people are traveling this weekend on their own or with classes, which put additional pressure on getting work complete during the week. I am sure everything will come together just fine this weekend – as it always does. It is simply crazy how a relatively dull week became stressful due to the coordination and preparation for different projects.