Reflecting Journal Essay

My first team work was in the 1st semester in Research methods. The task was to form the group and write the research paper on chosen topic. Our group of four decided to look at the demographic issue in Germany. This topic was something that we were all interested in so it was not a problem choosing the topic that we all agreed on. We first decided what we wanted to look at and how we were going to achieve this. In our first meeting we decided to split the topic into more specific topics: reasons, problems caused and future predictions. We set up a next meeting in one week and agreed that each of us will do a research on these topics. In our second meeting, we discussed our findings and distributed objectives for each of us. A list was created of the tasks we needed to perform and then we allocated each task to a time slot within our meetings. Our group worked well together as everybody had almost 100% attendance and was committed to getting the project done. However, we did have problems keeping to our schedule. At the very beginning, we conducted various researches which was useful for our paper and there we reached our first challenge- a lot of necessary information was provided only in german and 50% of our group was non-german speaking person. We had to redistribute topics for each of us based on research capacities. This speeded up the whole process. A large amount of time was spent during these meetings on the summary of our findings. This left us a lot of time when we came to the write up of our report. Another problem with our report was its incompleteness. As we put our parts together it looked like there were 4 different research papers in one. We had different structures, writing styles and some of group members in his/her part included information of his/her fellow topic. These issues required extra meetings and to rewrite the whole report.