Group Research Project Reflection
The group research project was a challenging and enjoyable experience typical of the course as a whole. I have had little exposure to group work at university so it was a nice change to be part of a pleasingly effective and dynamic team. I think we complemented one another quite well both in bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives and in balancing the work at hand. It was so satisfying to see a concrete policy emerge from our original deliberations.
The experience taught me that planning and crafting responses takes a longer time in teams than on your own. The extensive effort required was ultimately a good thing. When working alone, you can end up with an result that is identical to your initial plans. In our group, we were constantly developing and refining one another’s ideas. It was fascinating just how productive our group meetings were. The time seemed to fly and yet we always got a lot done and managed to help another along the way towards the endpoint of having a substantive policy.
We found the written brief quite easy to construct once we had formulated our policy. Two of the group were law students so we were well accustomed to having to make painful cuts to the word count of written work while retaining the meaning of our ideas. As always, concision can be a useful tool for formulating clarity. We tried to use the brevity of the brief to distill our thoughts down to what we thought was most important about our policy, and what set it aside from existing initiatives.
The formality of the brief was somewhat unfamiliar given that we are usually focussed on classic essay writing. It was a nice change to be able to take advantage of features such as diagrams and graphs to present complex information in a simple way. We found the costings and timeline requirements of the brief probably the most difficult part. I am not used to having to think about the practicalities of implementing my ideas. I really did not know where we would go but I think in the end we managed quite a solid and reasonable costing for our policy. I would be interested to see how our estimates would stack up were a professional to do it properly.
I was pleased with my performance in the oral brief to the Prime Minister. One of the reasons I wanted to take this course was to challenge my communication ability. I enjoyed being able to argue for the benefits of and rationale behind our policy and to present a positive image. Fielding questions without notice was a challenge but part of a useful set of skills which this course has imparted. We did not receive quite the questions which we had anticipated. This demonstrated that your perspective on a given issue can vary considerably from that of the person across the table from you.