Becoming a nurse

Group work

I don't know how they handle it at other universities, but here's a big focus on group work.

That's not a bad idea, because later on in our career as a nurse we are part of a team anyway. Training the ability to cooperate within a team is therefore more than useful.

This semester most of our lecturers decided to make group works. And it is not going to be less. What a fun. As we already have a lot of lectures to attend, you need additional time in the freetime to meet with the different groups. That's a challenge of organisation! But here we go.

After the first two weeks, you hopefully find out, if you are part of a good group. That means everybody is as involved in the project as the others. There shouldn't be just somebody doing the whole work nor somebody doing nothing but relax.

That's why in the beginning an important part is always to split up the work and clarify the role of each member. Creating a good communication tool like a whatsapp group, open a folder on dropbox or google drive aren't a bad start, eighter.

Putting up dead lines is quite helpful. Be aware, that the group internal dead line shouldn't be just the evening before handing in the project. One or two days befor the real dead line normally is enough time. Calculate a bit more time, if you need to print your paper.

Additionally, everybody has another imagination of how much engagement is enough. That underpins a recent event. In one of those group works we had to do research. The aim was to search for two studies, which had to be analysed. So far so good. I've found a study, but it was not suitable in the end. The consequences were that I've redone the research and found a better one. It didn't take me that long, in my opinion. But for a team mate, that seemed quite a bit of work. So the next time I had to do less work and my group mates did a bit more. In the end, everybody should have invested about the same amount of time and work into the project. A friend of mine had got rather a bad experience with group work. They had to do research, too. But in her group, some of the member just weren't interested to invest a bit of their valuable time to search for two studies. My friend told me that it was quite hard to find any studies which had anything to do with their research subject. She did her effort and found at least two average studies, but at least she had something. At the next group meeting she presented them and everybody was happy she found something and that it was good material. But it wasn't. She knew the truth. The other just said that, so they haven't had to do more research on their own.

In the end, it really matters with whom you're working together. You don't have to be best friends, but you should be able to work together for the same goal.