X-Culture Project: Valuable Lessons

Guest Blogger: Giovana Soares

Finally the X-Culture has come to an end after a lot of hard work, exchange of emails, and countless hours of revision.

Yesterday was a busy day putting everything together from all the group members. Everyone was supposed to write on every part of the report so we were all exposed to the whole concept of the service offered. Even though I was the team leader and established deadlines for everything, no one respected them and everyone turned their parts in yesterday – yes, the final day of the project! Even though I asked all of the group members to go over and revise he whole project together, only one did, and since he wasn’t a native English speaker, I could not ask him for an exceptional job, which left me with a lot to correct.

Unfortunately I cannot call my group a team, since not everyone was putting the necessary effort in order to create an exceptional business proposal. However, I was very fortunate to have an late addition to the group, a girl from Malaysia called Chin Ee Ling. Her and I were pretty much the ones to give life to the project, since almost no one really contributed to the project.

Even though the experience wasn’t great, I learned a lot from it. I learned that I should always take the initiative and be the leader. Sometimes doing much more than everyone and coordinating the group is less frustrating than not having anything being done (and end up with a bad grade). I also learned to appreciate the effort of anyone who is engaged in something that has a common goal with me. In this case, besides Chin, no one really appreciated the hard work and help I gave them, which made me upset; so next time I will make sure to thank a leader for his/her effort, since I know how hard it is to be in her/his shoes. And last but not least: never procrastinate (even though I didn’t as much as the whole team, their procrastination cost me many sleepless hours or work).