Friday, December 5, 2008

One Week Later

It has been a week since I finished school. As you may have seen from my last post, I was pretty upset about a few things.

Some of you may have noticed that I did in edit my last post. It contained a neat little list of things that bothered me. I removed it because I didn't want to give anyone false impressions about the work that actually gets submitted.

What happened was this: I had a group of people that worked on a project with me for my IP class. We divided up the project and everyone was supposed to write their part of the project. What ended up happening was that two of my group used Wikipedia extensively for their research when we were told in the first week that Wikipedia isn't an academic source... which makes sense given what Wikipedia is. I also had group members submit work to me that I felt was largely copied and improperly cited. I saw this because taking an article, copying large portions of it and throwing a reference at the end of a paragraph would probably not have been accepted as anything other than plagarism.

My anger came from the fact I felt there are people in my program with a severe lack of integrety and character. I was called out for focusing too much on marks, which I feel was not fair. I think that these people just don't get it... for me it is, and has always been about doing work that I am proud of. I want to stand in front of people and present ideas that I am proud of. I don't want to hand in somebody else's work, nor do I want to ride somebody else's coat-tails.

We got a high grade on our report. Above 85. And I should point out we lost 8 percent for not having an executive summary.... something I intentionally left out. I left it out because I was too tired to finish the report after having been up for two days working and doing that report. I left it out because I don't care about marks and by that point - I wasn't proud of the work or the process of getting it done.

Getting that mark is of no satisfaction to me. The realization that there are people who learned nothing in their 15 months in the program hurt even more. Since then, I have spoken to a few of my classmates and my story and my thoughts are not unique. So what am I going to do about it?

Nothing.

I have decided to just focus on myself, my career and my own personal development. It is clear to me that those people that don't get it are only concerned about themselves... otherwise they would care about reputation and integrity. While I don't pretend to be a bastion of either, I think that there is always more to do.

And now I have to get on doing it.