Ways Your Dreaded Group Projects Are Preparing You For Grad School

By Francine Fluetsch on May 27, 2016

This article is brought to you by Kaplan, the leader in test prep for over 90 standardized tests, including the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT.

We can all agree that group projects aren’t really things that we look forward to doing. They are stressful, time consuming, and force us to have to rely on other people, or if those people fall through, pick up slack that adds to our workload.

And you may be thinking, “how is this worth it? Will this ever pay off?” Your dreaded group projects, as horrible as they may seem at the time, are actually a great way to prepare for the world of grad school.

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Here’s how:

You gain people skills.

Group projects leave you frustrated, but since you’ll be stuck with the group members for a while, you can’t really snap at them. You need to keep things civil in order to get the project done and get a good grade on it. Learning to calm yourself in high-stress situations is a key skill to have for grad school. It makes you come off as friendly, personal, and a good team player, which is perfect for building up your connections, both with professors and your fellow students. The nicer you can be to everyone, the better. The classmates that you are surrounded with in grad school could be key connection pieces to scoring your first major dream job, so you never want to burn any bridges.

After dealing with countless group projects and figuring out how to keep your cool, you will gain vital schmoozing skills for both grad school and the real world. If this is a particularly hard thing to do for you, since it definitely isn’t easy to keep your cool when your group mates majorly suck, think of it as a thought experiment. How can you rephrase your words to get the same message across in a nice way? Study their reactions to see how far you can push before it’s too far. Analyze when you are getting mad and think of methods that will help calm this. Trust me, it will come in handy.

You learn how to trust.

While not every member in your group is going to be good, not every member is going to be bad, either. You start picking out the people you can trust, and allow yourself to rely on them for their shared aspect of the work. This can be rather hard to do, but in grad school, you are going to have to be working on major projects that are far too much to do on your own, so you have to learn to trust your colleagues and communicate with them so you are all doing your shared amount of work and can actually use a group setting for what it is intended for: relieving stress.

Trusting people takes time, especially when it comes to your academics, but learning who to trust and what you trust about them is key to succeeding in grad school. When my dad was getting his MBA, he had the same project group members for the duration of his time at the university. They learned to really become a team and trust one another, because they knew they were in it for the long haul and that they all wanted a good grade.

You learn how to get things done.

There is actually a benefit to having dealt with crappy groups, and that is that you learn how to get things done in a very short amount of time. We have all, at one time or other, realized the night before a project was due that some teammate or other either didn’t do their part or they did it wrong. In a determined rage, you somehow manage to bust out their part and tie it into the project, and your group ends up with an A.

While we all hope not to procrastinate things, grad school is going to be filled with heaps of assignments, so there are going to be times where you will have to bust something out last minute that you had to put off in order to complete something else. This isn’t ideal, but the group project experiences have shown you that you can do it, so it will give you more hope as you work long into the early morning to get things done.

You learn to explain things in new ways.

Group projects involve a lot of explaining and clarifying between group members, so it will teach you how to reiterate something in a different way to help people understand, and/or help you accept someone else’s interpretation of something and trying to see it from their point of view. A lot of the time, our first instinct is to fight our point and prove that we are right, but in group projects that usually gets you nowhere, so they help with finding different levels of understanding and learning when you need to settle and when you need to gently argue your point.

In grad school, you are going to have many different opinions and remarks thrown at you on how to do things, and some suggestions might be really helpful if you’ve learned how to listen.

These are just a few ways that those annoying group projects can actually come in handy later in life. Keep on keeping on, it will be worth it!

Learn more about Kaplan’s test prep options and start building the confidence you need for Test Day.

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