In university, there are 2 types of students. The one who always lead and one who never wants to. This blog post is the POV of one who almost never not the leader.
 |
| *dying inside* 🙂 |
I'm not tryna brag but I genuinely think that leaders are so rare. Speaking from experience, it's so hard to find someone else that can naturally lead a group and be reliably good at it.
Truth is, being a leader sucks.
You always have to start doing everything early even when you don't feel like it, because reality is that nobody wants to start the work. But you can't just ask and demand answers from your members expecting them to give a good idea - most of the time they're just not well thought out.
In the end, it's always me giving all the good ideas. Thankfully, ideas come naturally to me so the others just naturally agree with everything. Weirdly enough, I actually look forward to be criticized for my ideas, but never once that happened. Even when there's rejection, it's always me coming up with newer ideas to replace that and never someone else giving me theirs.
What sucks about it is what will happen after.
I gave all the ideas. Logically, other people shall continue to expand it and we'll divide our work, right? Ha ha ha, as if.
Expanding the ideas became my work, because I seem to be the only one who understand the root of my idea. Then I have to divide all the work myself because "I'm the leader" and everyone just want the easy way out.
Assigning work means I need to know how the overall content is gonna be, so obviously I need to do all the understanding and break them into parts myself. Sometimes the assignments given aren't clear yet I need to assume something, so everyone can have their own parts and do THEIR work.
At this point, I hope you can see how NOT EASY being a leader is and probably why everyone hates being one.
After everyone is done with their parts, somebody have to compile and check everything, right? I would be extremely blessed if I have another member who have sharp eyes and good comprehension skills to check, but unfortunately it's rare that anyone would care about the quality of it, like if there's direct copy pasting, uneven formatting, unrelated contents or just something as simple as typos. I have never personally work with anyone who is as particular of those things as much as me, so it has always been my work, leader or not.
As a fellow student, I feel so pissed every time people expect other people to clean up their mess. How wonderful would my uni life be if everyone cares about their own work and give their best at it. You don't have to look at much, just ensure you don't copy paste and clean up all the formatting. That will already be very helpful.
But if only life was fair.
Leaders aren't just the person in front but we have to push people from the back too and stressful is an understatement. I remember breaking down at the end of a semester because I had to lead even when I wasn't the official group leader. Everyone was just so irresponsible and didn't want to take the fall. Honestly, strangers or not, even friends can be such terrible groupmates.
I will be super thankful if even one member would personally come up to me and offer a hand to help. But like I said, they're rare.
Last week, I had 2 presentations and as you guess it, I am basically the "leader" by forced. The members are my own friends I'm close with but everything that I mentioned here, still occur.
I proposed the idea. This time, another friend helped with the basis of inspiration (bless them).
I wrote most if not everything in the report.
I divided the parts.
I lead the presentations.
And because they're people I know well, they're very cooperative in terms of responding and I'm grateful for that. But it doesn't cut out the fact that I can't put much faith in them.
After those presentations, my lecturers - to my pleasant surprised, praised us.
One of them said, "I can tell you've practiced more than once" and we did!
For that class we had to conduct a mock meeting and I prepared the entire 15 mins worth of script (let's not talk about the continuous hours I spent writing). I made sure we practiced together and we did a video call twice prior to the presentation day. It was leceh but thank God everyone were up for it.
I'm sooo happy my lecturer thinks we are good. I know I can pull it off myself, but I was scared for my friends because their language skills are pretty subpar. Glad the practice helped. Obviously, thanks to my scripts too. I came up with the entire meeting flow and it was definitely not as easy as you think. So much research!
Next presentation was about a project proposal. I was very anxious for this presentation because I did 85% of the work and I was scared for my friends for not able to present it well due to lack of understanding on the material. In the end I butted in a lot when our lecturer questioned our budget costs. All of the groups were questioned a lot for this part so no shocking there.
After all the intense confusion and goreng, we were asked how much do we think we deserve out of the 20 marks. All the groups were asked this at the end of the presentation. But before we could even say any value, my lecturer said "I think this is the first group that deserved the 20 marks". Mind you, we were THE LAST presenter for the day. He also said we were very professional during our presentation.
You have no idea how amazing it felt. I thought we did badly considering the amount of pressure he gave us on the costing part. It wasn't detailed enough for him. So when he said that, I was elated by it! It shows that I did really well on carrying my group.
I have never really been acknowledged for being a leader, despite being the official leader for at least 2-3 groups every semester. This is the first time I felt like I got a pat on the back.
Though I sometimes wish I can feel relaxed and depend on someone else for once - like the feeling of "know-know dah siap", I probably never will be able to anymore.
Being a leader sucks, the thought of having to care for other people isn't always fun. But if it's worth delivering good quality work and getting good grades, sure... haih 🤷
Dropping by,
Melynn.
