Final reflections (yeah, yeah, I know it's not REALLY over)

Final reflections are usually about what the students have learned during the course. This time it’s really hard to think of any concrete things or themes that I might have learned about. I don’t remember too much about the lectures to be honest. I remember liking the participatory methods sessions in the beginning and the workshop experiences later on. Then again I remember sitting at some of the guest speakers’ lectures and literally falling asleep. Not that the themes were not interesting, because they were. It’s just that it felt like I had heard all that before in the earlier SGT courses.

Also, towards the end of the course it just felt a bit stupid to sit at the classroom listening to some guy telling me once again about the importance of community participation in development projects, while at the same time we were really busy with the project and could have used that time working on it. It was the same old story again, and I felt like it didn’t support the project work or help me in any way with the situation we were in at the time. But who knows, if the group had been better organized and not in a terrible hurry, maybe I wouldn’t have been that stressed out and would have enjoyed the lectures as well.

So, if I didn’t learn much at the classes, maybe the project itself taught me something new? Well, not really. Turns out that lo-tech solar concentrator technologies are not exactly rocket science. Once we had come up with the design and the solutions for adjusting – and I’m not saying it was easy, it took a lot of effort and time – the rest was pretty much just about building the thing. But did I learn something new, some new skills or some new knowledge? Sure, I learned to recognize an 8 mm bolt from a distance and to use some power tools, but that’s pretty much it (still, I do value this, it might come handy later in life).

Was this all just a big waste of time then? Definitely not. I did learn a lot about myself, other people and working in a group. When I started with this course I knew that it would be a lot of hard work. Yet I didn’t have a clue of how frustrated and stressed out I would be at times. Normally with group works things have worked out quite OK, and usually the biggest problems and reasons for stress have been related to organizing the time (i.e. always starting everything way too late). Although we finally ran out of time with this project, too, I don’t think the actual problem of the group was organizing the schedule but communicating within the group.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this stressed out and frustrated because of just ten credits. At times I felt like the secret meaning of this course was that if I survive this, I would survive pretty much anything my future working life will bring me. In the end I did survive, although I have to admit that during the last month or so I thought about quitting almost daily. It would certainly have been the easy way out. However, I had already put so much effort into the project that it simply wasn’t an option anymore. This experience might not safe me from all the similar difficult situations in the future, but I have definitely learned an important lesson about how one should work in a group.