NCAA Bid Prajekt Reeflekshun

The NCAA Division II bid project as a great learning process in regards to communication, planning, and creativity. It also opened a window to how I handle different types of personalities in a group setting. The outcome of the project was in the realm of my expectations, and I realized a the lessons I am learning in my internship will valuable in the not-so-distant future.

We chose Austin, Texas as the site of our NCAA bid. Our group had six people and we divided the tasks up as evenly as possible. The communication that was required to take place in order to achieve a quality project was critical. Although we had four people living in Seattle, the communication was equal to those of the group members in Florida and Montana. However, we did a fine job and pulled it together with minimal work left to do once we arrived in Seattle this weekend.

The hypothetical planning was a great exercise for expressing ideas and putting them to work in a manner that was both realistic and functional. All members of our group had an area of expertise in which we felt most comfortable. For example, I have been working on participant manuals for events at UW, so I gravitated toward that task. Mindy is an extremely organized person, so she handled the overall organization and power point presentation, and so on for the rest of the group.

The creative element came into my portion of the project when I had to imagine the golf tournament and how things would be organized in a place I had never been. The Bluebonnet Hills Golf Course was hosting our event, with a fabricated event staff, room names, hole numbers, catering service, etc. Knowing how a golf tournament works, at the most basic level, helped my imagination fill in the blanks.

Our group had several different personalities ranging from hands-on (alpha) to laid-back. Several members of the group wanted to take on many tasks and may have been unwilling to give up some control, while others were late to the party and may have been slightly overwhelmed by the amount of initiative by the other members. I found myself being quite proactive until I found the pieces I was working on. At that point I took those pieces and secluded myself until I had it mostly complete. Then I brought them back and received feedback on them, made changes, and submitted them. Our group work was not evenly distributed in the end, but options were not always available for that kind of shared workload.

Moving forward I will feel more confident in taking the work myself and making it fit into a group project. Understanding my role and doing it properly was paramount in the completion of this project. I also learned that if someone is much more aggressive about taking on the bulk of a project, that I will either need to confront it, or let it be. Wavering int the middle of those two tactics only frustrates me and drags the group down.