Group projects: blessing or nightmare?

You might think: "oh great, I got a group project asigned with some of my best friends!" Well, I don't think that thought has ever crossed my mind. Group projects might be the worst nightmare I could ever put myself in. Maybe you love them, their easy, fun, simple; but they could appear in my personal house of horrors. 

So yeah, to get on mood for the incoming spooky season, I'm going to talk about something we've all gone through: Group Projects. 

You might have been asigned a group, or maybe you pick to be with your best friends, maybe it's an easy presentation or a complicated essay. It doesn't matter, it's all hell in my eyes. I just never had a good experience with group projects. See, when I work on my own, I can figure out a way to include pink on my biology diagram, but when I'm surrounded by people, I can't just add whatever I want. I can't put glitter or cute fonts. I have to ask. And yeah, I ask. I'm not the kind of people that goes around and does everyhting without asking. Those people suck. So I ask, and they usually either dismiss or ignore my suggestions. So my group projects often end up looking like a big corporation threw up on them. All info, no imagination. 

I've been wrongly called a controlling and bossy person all my life. Usually by friends outside school and my family, but when it comes to class, I leave all my bossiness out and try to put my best working face. I'm not there to start a war, I just want to finish and go home, you know? So, all through middle school and high school, my creativity was limited into nothing. That's why I used social media to escape. I used fonts and colors, and I let my inner graphic designer shine. Those were the only moments where I could be me. Group projects were just a small part me, but those pictures in my intragram, those edits on tiktok, this blog. That is me. Full on me. 

And I know, I know, that the font and color that Karen chose is more profesional. I know for an essay I can't actually use the fonts I want. I know I can't add pop culture references. I know. But I kinda wish we could. How come it's okay for a project's background to be baby blue, but the second it's baby pink, it stops being professional? How come it's perfectly okay to cite Aristotle but not Stevie Nicks? I consider Stevie Nicks to be the epitome of my philosophy. I should be allowed to add her. I should be allowed to put glitter, because adding sparkles doesn't make my essay any worse, does it? 

"I wanna love glitter, and also stand up for the double standards that exist in our society. I wanna wear pink, and tell you how I feel about politics. I don't think those things have to cancel each other out" - Miss Taylor Swift

(The Taylor quote was intentional, I know she haunts a lot of people's nightmares, so I decided to add her in case some hater wanted a jump scare)

See, I was in some class this morning, and we had to create this portfolio in groups to add all of our essays and investigations in ther. The teacher gave us complete creative freedom. Oh, how I love creative freedom. I was about to start pitching out ideas when I see one of my friends pull out this black and white corporative Canva template. First of all, a template??? I would've made the portfolio from scratch if they didn't want to waste any time, but okay, I can stand it if it's cute.

Except it wasn't cute. Nope. Not at all. 

I wanted to scream right there. I might've. I don't actually remember anything else but staring at the black Times New Roman letter float around my screen. "This is so profesional," I hear this one girl I'll call Karen for the sake of her privacy. "This will get us a perfect score," she smiles, as she adds the first image google gives us and the most bland and formal text ever.

I swear I would never waste creative freedom like that. But what could I do? My suggestions were being ignored for being too "unserious", too "girly", too me. But I bet you've never heard something be called "too manly to be used on a serious project", right?

Anyway, that's why I hate group projects. 

So wish me luck for next semester because I have a lot of black and white Canva's templates waiting for me... 

That's all for now,

happy october girls!