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- #149. Group projects
#149. Group projects
Shem Opolot
November 28, 2025
Hi! Welcome to The Friday Fix! You’re reading this because you probably stumbled upon this post somewhere on the internet instead of where it should be—in your inbox. But no worries; we can fix that.
Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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I have over ten years of work experience in healthcare, program management, and data analytics on two continents. So, I know a little about helping you work smarter
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I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 While reading Kareem Carr’s musings about statistics, because, you know, that’s what I do for fun sometimes, I was reminded about how much of a bad rep “bias” gets. First, because—to paraphrase what Kareem says—everything, and I do mean everything, we see is biased.
Second, bias can be useful if you know its direction. For example, if you’re an expert in “the end times” and you predict the world will end in two years, with some sort of margin of error (which is a bias of sorts), it’s helpful to know if your errors overestimate or underestimate the time.
LIFE.
Group projects.
As a teaching assistant who occasionally grades student assignments, my favorite time of the semester is the end.
Not because I dislike my job, but because of… peer evaluations.
After semester-long group projects, peer evaluations allow the students to rate their performance and that of their groupmates.
Each evaluation usually goes one of two ways: the student who, despite what they may have gone through or put everyone else through, gives their groupmates (and themself) a maximum score. I’m always this student, I’m afraid. This might have to do with my chronic desire to be liked, but I can’t afford your therapy rates.
Or… the student who follows the evaluation process religiously, giving strict scores with detailed comments providing context and justification. This student is ideal for us because we gain insight into the effort individuals applied and can triangulate worrisome signals in other individual assignments.
The student who consistently turns in individual assignments late usually gets poor reviews on group projects as well.
Group projects are annoying but essential because they reflect real life. Often, you have work to do in life and rely on others to supplement your efforts toward completing it. This is true in your family home, in your neighborhood, in traffic, in the bar, in the country, in the world—everywhere.
“My group members really covered for me when I had to skip a couple of crucial meetings to rush my daughter to the doctor.”
Not everyone exerts themselves fully all the time. Some days you give 100%, some days you give 1%; most days, you’re average. If everyone does the same, and hopefully not with the same cadence, things get done, and we arrive at a functional society.
Social loafers try to get away with consistently giving 1% and shirking responsibility for as long as possible while still benefiting from the group’s work. This is why gossip evolved. Gossip, when not co-opted by evil and idle people, was—and still is—useful for shaming social loafers into playing their part.
Most of life is a series of small and large group projects: putting the toilet seat down, parking your car within the lines, replying to a text, allowing an incoming driver from a feeder road to cut in ahead of you in traffic, picking up trash, not littering, holding the door open for someone, greeting a stranger, returning a stranger’s smile, paying taxes.
In every case, big and small, you should always ask yourself: “Am I playing my part?”
THINGS.
A quote.
Have you watched the romcom About Time with Rachel McAdams?
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
Now watching.
The plot is so contrived, so thrilling, and so indicting of bad husbands everywhere.
Source: Sky.com
A picture
I attended my first NBA game this week, and the Washington Wizards, which had previously won only one game all season, won convincingly on the night. No prizes for guessing where the good fortune came from.
WORK.
Filtering.
You have data:
You want to extract a specific product category in specific regions for a report, and you’re fancy, so you use the FILTER function like so:
Here’s how FILTER works:
=FILTER(range, condition1, condition2,…)
range - the data you want to filter
condition1 - the condition you want the filtered data to meet
condition2 - there can be more than one condition
Have you taken my course? Critics are raving about it.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> Variety’s ranking of the best comedies ever.
> Early Oscar 2026 predictions
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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