Team Project: Proposal writing

We had to come up with a proposal regarding a particular issue in Singapore which we were concerned about. After creating the proposal, we had to present it to the class too. We were divided into teams of two to three by drawing lots. My group members were Edmund Yap and Yip Kin Wai, and our chosen topic was about safety of cyclists on the road.

I have had the pleasure of working with Kin Wai before for another presentation. Thus I kind of ‘knew’ him. However, I had not worked with Edmund before. As such, I did not really ‘know’ him. But after working with him for a few weeks, I understood him better and the three of us became good friends although there were some misunderstandings along the way between the three of us. These misunderstandings we not because of our character differences, but rather due to the lack of understanding about what we really wanted for our project.

We were given the opportunity to choose the issue with which we were concerned with. Automatically, each of us suggested ideas which were very interesting to us. The only problem was that each idea that each of us suggested, did not interest the other members of the group. We decided that we would think about other ideas and relay them to each other before our next class. But due to our busy schedules, all three of us did not think of better ideas to suggest. So, as time was running out, we came to an agreement that our topic would be about road cyclists. Although we all agreed on that topic, none of us were actually passionate about that topic. Since none of us were really passionate about that topic, during our initial research stages, we procrastinated a lot. This lead to our work being backlogged. Because of the backlog of work that we had, we eventually had to rush through a lot of things which caused us to be a little frustrated which also created some misunderstandings between the three of us. But nonetheless, we managed to press on and complete the assignment with anyone getting injured.

To me the root of the problem was that none of us could agree on a single issue. I can understand that, as the three of us were very different people and had very different interests. I feel that we made a wrong choice by arbitrarily choosing a topic just so that all of us could agree on it. I feel that it would have been much better if each of us could somehow take the time to really show how much passion we had for our own topics, which could probably have interested the other members of the group too.  This would have been a better alternative rather than the path we chose. What do you guys think?