Topic 4

In this component, me and my group were researching homelessness and how it affects our different perspectives, I was member A who chose the environmental perspective. There were four more other members in my group and each of them chose a perspective to write about.

The way I came into this group was that it was the day for us to choose our groups and everyone was moving around. I turned around behind me to see that I knew a good two people in that group, which were members B and D. Member C, and E I did not really talk to as much before I had come into this group, but after, it was fun to get to know them and do this component together.

The first time we came together, we did not know what we were going to have our topic be about, so we started saying random things that could be a topic and after a few minutes, member E said homelessness and we stuck with it. Then we had to choose where our region was going to be focused on, and member B chose Central Florida ass our region. That was all that we had gotten done for our first day.

The next time we came together, we chose who was going to do which topic, and then we started to brainstorm our ideas while we were designing our introductory slides for our presentations. Member E also mentioned that we should think about encounters that we had with homeless people so we could better relate to our topic and to help us better come up with ideas. He had a lot of interesting stories to talk about and how he sometimes goes up to them and starts a conversation. He talked about how he has been to their camps before that are in the woods of where we live. We all were talking in a group discussion at this point and talking about how these camps for homeless people are more prevalent than we think, and they are in places that we would never think of and places that we pass by all the time.

At another get together, we did try to look up problems to talk about specifically in our slides and how they impact our topics. The time we were searching things up was a hard time because it was difficult to find things about our perspectives that were up to date and relevant to what we were writing about. It took me a good two weeks of get togethers for me to find something that was relevant to my topic. The graphs were also hard to find for me since there weren’t many things that showed what I was looking for in a graph. I know that Member B was breezing through his topic and finding the things he needed.

There were days that we came together, and we were talking about things that were completely off topic. I remember this one day where member B and D were talking about cars and the type of cars that are good in their opinion and different parts of cars to the point where I had no idea what they were talking about and the parts that they were naming. At some point I looked over to them and said are you guys even doing any work? Member D looked at me sarcastically and said we are totally doing work LOL. Even though when I looked over at his computer, he was on the same screen for the past 10 minutes. I know that day we barely had gotten anything done because those conversations were intriguing but at the same time, it distracted all of us.

There were some days that I had no ideas of what else to talk about so they would help me come up with things and how to format my information. Most of the time we would be researching because of how much limited information we could find that was current.

The thing about this group, we would always be talking, it would never be a dull moment. They were also good at keeping everyone engaged in their conversations, especially me since I would barely talk.

Overall, this experience was very fun, but at the same time stressful to get the information together. The thing about a group project though is that having more than just yourself doing something gives you the opportunity to be able to get different ideas and opinions instead of just your own. This experience also brings you to make new connections to people and f\have fun while doing work I am glad to have been with this group and come up with the information that we did.

Word count: 794