As a student who had previously taken almost no group project classes over my four years of undergrad at Stanford, I found this class to be challenging yet rewarding. Some of the new concepts I learned that I imagine will be very useful include interviewing skills, giving out and accepting bids, and OKRs. While these three skills will help me greatly in my professional development, I foresee they will positively impact my personal life even more. I thought the content of the class was a great balance of new learned material and practical application. I really appreciated the way we were challenged to practice the skills and topics we learned. I feel this is a huge gap that is not often addressed in academia.
Regarding the group project, I believe my group did a great job of communicating and getting work done on time. I definitely was challenged to voice my opinions when people were not performing and communicating in a way that contributed to the success/cohesion of the group. Through role play of conflict resolution, I was able to learn how to navigate tricky situations without any of the conversations carrying personal meaning. While I enjoyed getting to know my group members better, it can be distracting and add certain difficulties to do projects with friends. If I had to do it again, I would likely not choose to be in a group with friends. It feels like there is more at stake when confronting conflict when you have external relationships with people.
One of the only critiques that I have for this course is that everything felt a bit rushed and ambiguous. There was not a ton of guidance or emphasis on choosing a project, but then it was relatively important to stick with that project for the rest of the course. We learned this the hard way as our group was extremely slow to come to a consensus on our project topic. This delay led to us having to redo a lot of foundational work once we finally picked a topic. It would be helpful for future iterations of this course for more emphasis to be put on choosing the original topic of the project and avoid pivots as much as possible. This leads to me saying if we had more time, I think we would have pivoted the project after the third milestone and/or spent more time nailing down our project before continuing to work at each milestone. We had so much work to get done before the next milestone that we often just continued working even if we were not all on the same page.
Finally, I want to acknowledge how much I enjoyed the teaching team for this course. All of the TAs (especially Katherine) were super helpful, attentive, responsive, and caring. Christina’s teaching style and desire to genuinely support the success of her students is unique and inspiring.
