How to build a team for a university group project
In most courses you don't build the team. The professor assigns it, or a randomiser does it for you, and you find out who you're working with at the same time as everyone else.
I'm a student in Vienna, and this is how nearly every group project I've had was formed. It's the part of university work I'd change first.
What random assignment actually costs
A group project is a lot of work, spread over weeks, and your grade depends on people you didn't pick. That's the whole problem in one sentence.
When you choose your own team, you're choosing for one thing above all: trust. Not who's smartest — who will still be answering messages in week four. Random assignment removes that choice, so every project starts with the same open question: is anyone here as invested as I am?
Sometimes the answer is yes. Often it isn't. And the cost isn't just an unpleasant few weeks — it's a worse piece of work than any of you would have produced with people you'd chosen.
Even the team that worked wasn't evenly split
I've had group projects that went well, and it's worth being precise about why.
Not because the work divided evenly. In most of them a few people contributed very little, and the rest of us covered the difference. The result was good because someone absorbed the gap — which is a different thing from a team that functioned.
We all say the work should be split equally. In a team you didn't assemble, it usually isn't. Someone ends up carrying more than their share, and where nobody does, the project simply comes out worse.
What you'd actually want to know before choosing
If you could choose, what would you even look at? Not a name on a list.
You'd want to see what someone has already done. What they've worked on before, what they're good at, whether they've finished things. Give me a profile and a couple of past projects and I can make a reasonable decision in a minute. Give me a randomised list of names and I can't make one at all.
That's the asymmetry worth noticing: choosing well doesn't require much information. It requires any information.
The other half of the problem: how you actually work
Say you get a decent team. You still have two practical problems, and both are usually solved badly.
Files. Most teams end up in a WhatsApp group. It's fine for messages and bad for everything else — documents get buried under conversation, and by week three nobody can find the version that matters.
Task division. Somebody has to say "you do this, you do that, I'll do this." There's no natural way for it to happen, so either one person appoints themselves and takes on the coordination as extra unpaid work, or nobody does and the deadline decides for you.
Neither of these is a hard problem. They're just problems nobody owns, in tools that weren't built for them.
If you can choose, choose. If you can't, move first.
Advice for the first group project, when you don't know anyone yet: take the initiative and don't be nervous about it. There's genuinely nothing at stake socially — it's a university assignment, not a job interview.
Concretely, in the first week:
- Say out loud who's doing what, before anyone has started. The awkward five minutes at the beginning saves the bad three weeks after.
- Put the files somewhere that isn't a chat.
- Agree on one check-in date in the middle. Most teams discover a problem in the final week that was visible in the second.
If you can choose your team — a seminar where it's left to you, an optional project, anything outside the assigned courses — choose deliberately. You will almost never get better information than "who has done this kind of thing before," and that's already enough.
Where to find people you'd actually pick
This is part of why Flokka exists. You post what the project is and what you need — someone who can handle the data side, someone who's done a presentation-heavy course before — and people who match can see it. Their profile shows what they can help with and what they've worked on, so the choice is made on something more than a name.
And once the team exists, the work lives in one place: the chat, the files and the checklist together, instead of a group chat plus four other apps.