paraphrase my friend work its a reflection paper due in 2 hours

Personal reflection paper

Question 1. Goals

The three goals that I would set for myself in any future project after this are to finish the project within the stipulated time, to finish it with the same level of quality and to follow the specified guidelines. To begin with, time is important for the success of any project. There are those that require a shorter time to complete but demand a higher level of quality. Similarly, there are those that may take longer, allowing the project team to put in place all the quality measures. From our experience as a team, it is important to take seriously each scenario.

No time is shorter or longer if the team is committed to delivering on time. I would therefore choose to be in a project where each participant does everything possible to drive the project’s objectives and to ensure it stays on time. This means that the first stages of the project should be rid of guesswork as they are important foundations for the planning. Every member therefore should have in mind the project’s time frame and take every meeting seriously.

My second goal would be complete the project with the same level of quality. Whoever commissions the project would obviously have their required quality. Even if it is an academic work, there is a standard quality. I would therefore ensure that I achieve the highest standards possible despite constraints of time and resources. This will also enable us get good grade and maintain this standard when advancing my career.

One of the greatest sources of failure of projects to meet their objectives is the rush to beat time. If every team member plays their roles as per the plans, there are limited reasons why the project would lag behind. This is why I would ensure that my team grasps the objectives and the timelines of the project from the onset. This would mean that I bring together a team that is motivated and ready to deliver the project’s success.

My third goal would be to follow the project’s guidelines strictly. Every project has guidelines that have to be followed. Even if it is an academic research or a commissioned project by a client, one must stick to the given guidelines. This would not only make my work easier but also make my client or reader happy. More so, the instructor who marked this project will indeed be happy if I follow these guidelines especially when grading the project using grading rubric.

It is understood that some projects may require a little innovative input from the person carrying out the project. However, such may only be necessary if they are done in consultation with the entire team. Any little decision may introduce new guidelines and derail the project. From my team’s experience, some innovations may not be worth the effort. Therefore, following the guidelines will indeed make me get the best from this capstone project.

Question 2: discoveries I made

Some people may love working alone. I too at times find it peaceful and more absorbing working by myself. However, there are benefits of working in groups that I discovered during the project. First, it helped break complex tasks into simple steps and parts. In essence, whatever I had found difficult to understand while studying alone suddenly became clearer and easily understandable. Group work therefore helps, like I realized, to prepare an individual to work better when they are on their own.

The second thing I discovered was that working in groups helps one manage and plan time. Time management is key to success of any task and economical use of resources. From our project, we managed to schedule all our tasks and ensured that each task is completed within the scheduled time. Because all our team members had to stick to the project’s timeline, we also had to manage our time. Despite a few cases, we could meet as scheduled and share our thoughts on the project’s progress. This way, we could also hold each other accountable for any part of the project that was not progressing as planned. We managed to complete all these tasks on time despite some few challenges like time constraint and limited resources.

My third discovery of group work is that it equips one with proper communication skills. As we shared our thoughts about the project, I realized that I really improved in my conceptualization of ideas. The discussion and the explanations from my colleagues helped not only to refine the ideas, but also to train me in communication. In fact, it gave me the courage to challenge assumptions that were presented by some team members, but which I felt were unnecessary generalities.

Question 3. Challenges/realizations

Every successful project has had its inevitable share of challenges. The first challenge we had, especially at the beginning was leadership. This of course jeopardized the coordination of the team and threatened to derail the project. We took long selecting our leaders and once we selected leaders (team leader and secretary), we had to take more time bonding. For a project to be successful, it should have a strong and dedicated leadership from the onset to build an impetus that can lead it to completion.

Secondly, a project that brings together sharp minds with diverse opinions always leads to conflicts. I realized that even though harmony was always achieved in most times while doing the project, conflict often occurred during brainstorming as some people were not sticking to brainstorming rules of not ridiculing others’ points. While I consider some of these as negative, they were only on opinions and strategies of completing the project. While some were solved faster to allow the project to run, some dragged along with a few members of the team failing to agree on the right course of action. In fact, we had to drop two opinions because we could not find a middle ground.

The third realization was that there is need for members of the team to trust each other. Mistrust within the team can lead to uneven communication that can derail the project. In our case, the beginning was marred with a lot of contradictory communication because the leadership of the team was not very clear on the plan of action. It is only after two meetings and the team members building a rapport that things started to work out.

Question 4. Skills/knowledge

A number of classes and lessons in general education have helped me in the completion of the project. To begin with, the success of any capstone project has a lot to do with the skills acquired in a research methods class. One of the key issues that the class teaches is originality. A researcher must have a deep understanding of the topic that he or she is dealing with.

Lack of originality is when one engages in a literature review but then regurgitates the ideas instead of understanding them. Understanding the concept of originality therefore enabled me to formulate my own perspective of the project and to draw my conclusions. It is these conclusions that formed part of the opinions that I shared with my team members. Having many of such opinions makes a project stronger in standing.

A lesson in an orderly and objective inquiry was also important in the completion of the project. This class equips one with the ability to ask the right questions and to understand and synthesize the ideas. This makes it easier to identify the evidence presented and draw conclusions. During my reading of the materials that formed the background of the study, found this quite useful, especially because it enabled me to have a better grasp of the project.

To come up with a compelling and recognized research, there is need for objectivity at all stages. Objectivity is not just about how one communicates ideas, but also how they utilize the available tools they get in the process of reading to solve problems. This class therefore helped me expand my intellectual stretch to places that I had never known I could reach. Moreover, objectivity allowed me to read works on the same subject as ours with a lot of attention to find out their points of departure.

The last class that was no doubt the bedrock of the project was grammar. There is an informal saying that good grammar can open doors for you. In this case, good grammar is what makes your project worth reading. A project may have excellent ideas, but if they are poorly written and poorly organized, the project is headed nowhere.

During our grammar lessons, some of the most important components of grammar that we learnt were clarity and précis. After researching and bringing together a heap of ideas, the biggest task that a researcher is left with is to arrange the ideas to make meaning. This means that the thoughts have to be organized in a flowing manner such that the reader can easily get the arguments by other sources and the researcher’s point of departure. Good grammar thus clarifies the gist of the research and makes the argument worth following. Any writer needs proofreading to ensure that the work is flowing. In our case, we had to read the work more than once before giving it to a third party to read and make suggestions.