0012 Your First Group Assignment
The Brief
Welcome back Ladies and Gentlemen to the Architecture Student Diaries where it is my mission to help you kill it in Architecture school whilst making you, the best you in the process. Unfortunately, it is time, time for you to embark on your first university group assignment. Most people by the time they are entering university have scars from past group assignments in High School or Middle School where they have had group members who either did terrible work, no work or argued with every word you said. I am sorry to tell you, but you are most likely going to encounter this during university as well. Group assignments though frustrating are inevitable and as you get deeper into architecture school, they will become more and more common and are important to prepare you for the real world collaboration you will encounter in the industry. It is possible though to get through group assignments with good marks, solid end products and lots of laughs; you just need to apply yourself with the following tips.
Below is a breakdown of what we will discuss in today's lesson:
What to Expect
Accountability and Planning
Your Team
Stay in Contact with Staff
Collaboration is Key
The Benefits of Group Assignments
Now, let’s get into it. Class is now in session.
What to Expect
When you hear the words ‘group assignment’ do you roll your eyes? Was your answer yes? If it was, then you are not alone. Group assignments are a universally disliked concept, though with solid reasoning for their existence; group assignments prepare you for the real world of dealing with different types of people. Typically, in first year group assignments you will not be able to choose your team, you will be allocated a random group by the staff and be forced to work with these people. This can be a positive as it means you will be exposed to new perspectives from people you don’t know, but it will also mean those of you with shy personalities may be slightly intimidated at the start of the assignment.
You need to be prepared for the worst possible outcome in group assignments which are the people who simply do no work at all and disappear until it is time to present. These people are inevitable in university and they make life difficult at times, but this issue can be avoided and how to do this will be explained later in the article. Group assignments are usually different to independent assignments in structure and marking, as certain marks are usually allocated to collaboration and teamwork; so make sure you put in as much effort as possible to maximise your score.
Accountability and Planning
If you want to succeed in a group assignment, you need to create a clear and achievable plan at the very beginning. As a group you need to look through and understand the brief, from here you need to delegate who is to undertake which part of the assignment and if some people are required to work on one element together. You need to create a timeline and a contract (typically referred to as a team charter) that outlines exactly what each member is to do, when each member is to have their part completed by and have each member sign this document to ensure that everyone is on the same page and agrees to the plan. Having this contract drafted and signed off on from the very beginning creates accountability for each member and provides evidence to show to a staff member in the instance that someone has not completed their part for submission.
It is integral that your group stays in contact throughout the assignment to ensure that everyone is up to date on their part and that everyone is readying their work for collation at the completion of the task. This contact can be achieved through online messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Instagram, Email and group text messages depending on the group's preference. I also recommend that group meetings are held regularly throughout the assignment where the team charter is used to check that everyone is up to date on their personal section and any issues that have arisen can be resolved. Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic online meetings have become commonplace as opposed to face to face meetings which many students find suit them far greater as these can take place at any time and any location. There is now no excuse for saying “we couldn’t find a time to meet, Sir.”
Your Team
In life you will discover in time whether you are a leader or a follower, neither of these two personality traits necessarily place you in a stronger position to become a successful architect, but rather they will simply decide the direction of your career and the types of tasks best suit your abilities. In basic terms, if you are a follower you are most likely to work in a firm for someone else and do your prescribed tasks really well, or if you are a leader you will most likely avoid that option and work your way to being a manager, start your own firm or become a partner in an already developed firm where you are your own boss. This mentality you will bring into your professional career, as with most things, directly correlates to your university degree, in this instance group assignments.
If you are a leader:
Take charge, be strong, be dependable and well prepared; this will allow you to ensure the assignment runs smoothly and creates a strong end product. You are here, reading The Architecture Student Diaries, so I trust that you are someone who takes your course seriously and that if you are in charge of managing your group assignment you will ensure it stays on the correct track. I personally am strongly in the leader category and do my best to always ensure that I am the person in charge of the assignment, and this has always led me to strong marks in group assignments. If you do this consistently and consistently get good marks other students will see this about you and, once you are deeper into your degree and can choose your group members, will usually be able to create teams where the other members already understand that you will be the one in charge. This assumption of always being the person in charge comes in handy in the way that people do not try to fight you for leadership, but it can also be frustrating where some students simply assume that you will be the one in charge and will fix everyone else's problem. Make it clear from the start that you are willing to be the leader but that does not in any way mean that you are there to do other people's work.
If you are a follower:
Do not simply assume that because you are not in charge that you do not need to do as much work, take what the leader says on board and work with them. This is a collaborative exercise and you should be putting in your own personal input as you may have a clever idea that the leader has not thought of. Make sure that you treat the other members with respect, do your work to a high standard and meet all the prescribed deadlines and meeting dates because in most assignments, just because your assignment is of high quality in the end, does not mean that everyone will gain the same mark. As a leader type myself, I know the way in which they think, and if someone does not put in enough effort in the assignment, the staff will most likely be notified and therefore the slack member will get lower marks. If the work is evenly distributed within the team charter, gaining equal and high marks should be no issue if you do good work.
Stay in Contact with Staff
Group assignments are the time that staying in contact with staff members from the beginning of the task is most important. In most group assignments, especially earlier on in your degree, you will have at least one group member who is not putting in equal effort to the others in the group; this needs to be monitored and discussed with a staff member. The earlier you are able to begin conversations with staff, the better your end result will be, as they will have built up evidence of the problem member. If a member does not do their work, let your tutor know and they will begin to keep an eye out for the issue and will most likely check up on you and your group throughout the assignment to see if the issue has been resolved. Exposing the problem member is important in the instance that a portion of your assignment may be missing at the time of submission and this needs to have justifiable reasoning to avoid the group being dealt a bad grade.
If staff have evidence from throughout your assignment of weak members, for example a string of emails from you to your tutor, then it is far simpler for the staff to mark the good members pieces well and only the slack member be given a poor grade. So, stay in contact with your tutor if a member is not doing what they should, it could save your grade. Furthermore, sometimes students drop out of university without telling anybody, this means that in some group assignments a member may completely disappear, they may not answer any messages and you may not see them in any classes ever again... This is another instance where you need to contact your tutor as soon as possible. If someone in your group appears to have disappeared and you contact your tutor, they may be able to find on the university enrolments if that person is no longer part of your course and arrange a solution for your group. Otherwise, it will simply assist the tutor in awarding fair grading to the members who did not ghost the group.
Collaboration is Key
Once you graduate and you are a registered Architect working in a firm, unless you work for yourself and you are the only person in your company; you will have to work with other designers. The best part about working with other designers is that you get to be exposed to other people's ideas and concepts. Do you want to know the worst part about working with other designers? You get exposed to other people's ideas and concepts... Sometimes it can be hard working with other people in a design profession because what you want the design to look like, may be completely different to what your partner wants the design to look like. Working on written group assignments is far simpler for collaborative work as generally you can simply assign a topic to each person and collate at the end; in design-based assignments though, this is different. It is a good thing that everyone has their own personal styles and ideas because it creates a world of multiple dimensions and layers and means that the concept of architecture will never be boring. In a group assignment this can be frustrating though as it can be hard to decide on a design that everybody likes and most of the time you will have some people who are not completely sold with the end product, this is nearly impossible to avoid.
The key to minimising this issue is to work as collaboratively as possible from the very beginning. Sit down around a table as a group and work on absolute basics, everyone should have a pencil and a piece of paper and you should be writing down words and drawing basic shapes like curves or squares to decide upon the direction that the building is going. Once everyone has agreed on a basic direction to go, such as that the building is going to be inspired by the movement of waves in the ocean, you can start to move into more in depth design and analysis. You need to work together on this though, because you can’t simply allocate someone to design a floor plan and someone to design the elevations without ensuring that each is working to the exact same parameters and dimensions. If you do this, you will end up with a façade that does not fit the floor plan and design flaws like a huge window directly behind a toilet.
The Benefits of Group Assignments
Networking:
It’s who you know, not what you know; one of the world's oldest sayings and yet a sentence that has never been more relevant. Group assignments exist in university for a reason, that being because they assist in creating career ready professionals and expand a student's network. Networking in the digital age is an integral skill as a large portion of today's professionals are employed in new positions through people that they know as opposed to through traditional methods such as applying for positions and handing out resumes. By undertaking group assignments, students are forced to network and leave their comfort zone where they are solely responsible for their own results.
Group assignments allow you to meet other people at the same stage in their professional career as you and most likely with similar interests. You never know where other students will end up, a group member from first year may be the person who interviews you for a job position ten years in the future and if they know you are a strong candidate because of the way you handled yourself ten years ago in that assignment, you may just be the new front runner for that job. I have mentioned several times above about the correlations between group assignments and working in the professional scene, this is a major player when it comes to the benefits of group assignments.
Preparing You for the Professional World:
When you are working as an architect, you are almost guaranteed that at some point, you will have to work in a team on a project; the bigger the projects you work on, the bigger the teams you will work in. Gone are the days when single architects are responsible for entire tower structures, almost all large buildings you see these days will have several names and teams of architects behind them who are each dedicated to different parts of the design. These may include the likes of a facade, floor plan, interior, fixtures and fittings and so on. Working in group assignments prepares you for this atmosphere of collaborative design and will be very valuable in becoming a successful registered designer. Working in groups like this can be beneficial for a design as every designer has unique abilities, talents and ideas that can be combined to create something you alone may not have been capable of. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and it is important that you work with these in mind. If someone is great at conceptual design, let them do that, if someone is incredibly talented at sketching by hand, let them do the drawing, if someone is a pro at Revit, let them do the 3D model; collaboration is about doing the best with what you have.
Less Work for Better Grades:
Group assignments can also be a simple way to get a high mark. If you think about individual assignments, everything about your end mark is up to you and the effort you put in, in the case of a group assignment though, it’s not just you. Yes, if you have poor group members you may be doomed for a less than ideal grade, but if you make sure that everyone does what they should, you may just be in for a great mark with far less workload. Let’s use the examples of a 2000-word individual assignment and a 4000-word group assignment, yes, technically the group assignment is bigger, though if you have a group of 4 people, you only have to do 1000 words each which is half the size of the individual assignment. So, if each member puts in a strong performance for their 1000 words, you will get a good mark by only doing half the work that you would have in the individual assignment.
Final Notes
I know that group assignments typically get a bad name and people avoid them whenever they can, but as I have discussed above, there are actually a lot of reasons to embrace them. If you follow these tips, you will be able to get through your group assignments without the headaches, and you may make some friends and helpful acquaintances along the way. Don’t be scared of group assignments like most people, look at them as work experience, preparation for the next phase of your life and a way to get a good mark with lower level of personal outfit. Seize the opportunity and I wish you all the best for getting the best group members possible.
Ladies and Gentlemen, class dismissed.
Iain Colliver, SONA, YBA, GKIHS
