Working within a group is something that everyone will experience multiple times throughout their life. Being able to effectively work in a group is so important because it allows you to collaborate on projects. Most, if not all, of my courses at Longwood required some form of group work to get us comfortable with working in groups we picked as well as groups that were chosen for us. We needed to be able to work well with our friends and those we really didn’t know in order to show that we can adapt to multiple situations that may come up in future careers. Some of the courses that I worked within groups were from Introduction to Genetics and Cell Biology, Cell Biology, and Senior Capstone in Biology.
My course in Introduction to Genetics and Cell Biology was my first group project that I conducted at Longwood since transferring from James Madison University (JMU). I was nervous because I didn’t know anyone in the class and since I was overwritten into the course late, I was thrown into a group of three instead of two like the rest of the class. I was afraid this would make the project hard. I was right and wrong at the same time. While my group and I all worked well together to investigate the effect that water flow had on bacterial diversity, having three people challenged us to widen our experiment so that each of us could equally participate. What I mean by this is that rather than having two samples to analyze we decided to collect three so we could all have our own. This seemed smart in the beginning but then quickly went south when data couldn’t be collected for two of the samples, so we had to all share the one. Regardless, this group project was one to remember and I have definitely come a long way in both experimental and poster design. Below is my poster that I presented with my group at Longwood University’s Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry in 2017.
The Effect of water flow on the Bacterial Diversity in Prince Edward County
A few semesters later, I was in another group of three in Cell Biology, but this was different because I was actually friends with these people. I believe that this can make or break a group project depending on what roles each person tends to take. For this group project, we began by searching for yeast genes that we thought contributed to flocculation in the beer making process. None of us knew what we were doing but we all were motivated to have an interesting project by the end. My group settled on FLO11, a flocculation gene that has an uncharacterized domain. At first, I was not really on board with investigating something so unknown as I imagined the many complications and dead ends that we may hit, but one of my group members and professor were so interested in this that I put my faith in them and agreed. Part of group projects sometimes means compromising on things in hopes that it will all turn out well. Luckily for us we found some pretty neat information which made our presentation go quickly smoothly since everyone had the chance to discuss one aspect of our results. Below is my poster that I presented in the Spring of 2019.
The main work completed in the Biology Senior Capstone course are presentations with most of them being group presentations each week. This was designed so that four groups would present each week from different objectives. Those being to present a review presentation (reviewing background biological information needed to understand the main research article), research article presentation (presenting the research article), companion article presentation (a discussion based presentation related to the research article topic), and a New York Times article presentation (interesting article of that groups choice). These presentations had varying requirements such as timing. Before these rounds took place, we were put into groups based on our personal preferences and typical roles we take on in a group. I am very happy with the group I was placed in because everyone seems to produce quality work efficiently. One of the presentations I felt would be the hardest to complete would be the research article presentation. I believed that it would be intimidating to present research that was not my own however our presentation on stress and telomere length turned out to be fun to present. We split up the presentation into four sections so that each of us had the chance talk equally. Below is my PowerPoint presentation that I presented to my class in the Spring of 2020.
Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress
The Biology and Environmental Science Department constantly makes it a point to have group projects to that we learn to work well with others. With others you can bounce off ideas, develop very complex experimental designs, and delegate out the work evenly so that you don’t have to take it all on by yourself. As I always like to say, “Teamwork, makes the dream work.”