<p>I have a lot of respect for engineers and they are very bright. My son is a senior at a state college and I am shocked to hear how many engineering students he has come across that will not take responsibility and do the work. </p>
<p>Surely, if you are about to graduate in Engineering then you have passed several classes, you must have an interest since you didnt change majors. </p>
<p>But he was assigned a group and working on a year long senior project with a team. Out of 5-6 people, only him and one other are doing the work. The other students dont show up, dont return emails/calls, aren't contributing etc. They have even complained to professor about concerns of project being completed, yet the other students dont get involved.</p>
<p>Seriously...what's with this? We don't get it. And I know another kid at another school, just starting out with Engineering, having the same problems.</p>
<p>At D school they did peer evals on the project work, so in the case of the no shows, do nothings, it was fair game to let the professor know who did and who didn’t pull their weight.
Engineering students are no different than any other social structure.
D being the only female in one of her group projects was delegated by the groups male chauvinist to get coffee, which she would refuse.</p>
<p>Don’t know what to tell you, I guess I’ve been blessed in the group/partner situations I’ve been put in. I’ve always gotten groups where everybody at a bare minimum pulls their own weight. Sometimes professors have to hear something more than once, consider scheduling another meeting and having very stern talks with the other people in the group. Provide as much documentation as you can for what work YOU are doing.</p>
<p>It can be a problem. Usually it’s just lazy peers, readily willing to take advantage of more ambitious partners. Occasionally it is due to the “leaders” being too stubborn about the how things should be done.</p>
<p>want to know the problem? sure some are lazy etc.
But often the main problem is that the person does not know what to do. Either the project is really open ended and often just requires some tinkering around for a bit without any real progress, or material is not taught well and most of the people don’t know whats going on. Or that person does not know the material. With all the other work you have, often people dont like doing work on something they dont have a good understanding on. </p>
<p>What happens with engineering is that often you go through such structured classes and then suddenly you start open ended classes with projects. </p>
<p>Some are plain lazy, but i believe lack of knowledge or direction in project is often a key too.
Often prjects have relativly large time frames. With that often times work does not get started until near the deadline</p>
<p>Could just do what I did in a class I had. Throw everyone under the bus. Had a big email paper trail to back it up. Oh yea, karma can be an evil mistress.</p>
<p>Every team needs one person to step up and assume the leadership / project management role, especially for term projects or for projects with many people involved. If you don’t have somebody assigning specific tasks/roles and setting internal deadlines within the team, project do often flounder. I think it’s relatively rare in engineering for somebody to be completely lazy and not do anything at all (in my experience). The issue is usually that people procrastinate, which is not something that any team can afford for a large project.</p>
<p>My advice; do the work you are assigned to do and, if necessary, other people’s work in order to get the project done. If these other people are either lazy or not equiped to do their work, why let that drag down your grade?</p>
<p>Know that once you start your professional career, those that get the work done are generally the ones that get ahead. You’ll get the best assignments because you can do the work. You get the pay raises because you do do the work.</p>
<p>Livelife: My daughter experienced the same thing at her engineering program at UB. She said she got fed up with doing all of the work while most of the team ditched the work. She would complain to the professors, who basically said that it was her problem and that in “real life”, you have to deal with the non-workers. </p>
<p>In some instances, it was because the kids were disorganized and didn’t know where or how to start, so as she developed a tougher shell, she would say, “this is what we’re going to do, here are the parts that need to be done and assigned, anyone else have any ideas?, No? Then here is our project” and she found that this was the only way to get through with her “teams”. If someone didn’t come through with their part, they were emailed and texted often and their status was reported to the professor.</p>
<p>All three of my children hate team projects.</p>
<p>The company I worked for had a “pay for performance” raise plan. So, when I was manager, I had to figure who did the work and who were the slackers (obviously, if you did no work, we had a separate plan for them). Funny thing that the good performers loved the raise philosophy and the slackers would come and ask me why the company just didn’t give out uniform raises to all!!!</p>
<p>One of the better performers came to my office one day to complain about one guy who wasn’t at the top of his game. He was quite upset until I pointed out that someone got the good assignments (ie. him) and some the more mundane (ie. the one he was complaining about). I also pointed that his last pay raise was about twice the company average and the money had to come from somewhere. When we had a slow down in work, it doesn’t take much to figure out who stayed and who was let go.</p>
<p>I think the saying is: “What comes around, goes around”.</p>