ECHOing disaster.

Group work in school often goes pretty well for me.  In most cases, people are seemingly more than willing to do their share, work together in effort of thoroughly completeing the task at hand and getting a good grade in the process.

Why doesn’t this situation ever seem to transcend into the workplace? How many times have you noticed/caught/been fed-up with co-workers for not contributing their fair share.  Students must care more because it’s their education at hand, or perhaps because they’re paying for it.  Or maybe, as my worst group experience finally comes to mind, not.

Okay, this post was going to be on co-workers dropping the ball rather than students, but it just occured to me that it’s actually something more closely related to actual the actual student presence in the workplace being the cause of it all.

Example: Echo magazine, the Columbia College Chicago student publication.  So, here I am at late registration in August of ‘07, where it all started and I first met Sharon, the head of the magazine dept. at Columbia.  As a transfering journalism student, my pre-reqs. were all done, and I couldn’t possibly sign up for all J-classes without taking a few basic ones first.  Talking to Sharon, I expressed a love for photography and a desire to include it with my studies.  That’s when she informed me of an open position as Photography/Illustration Editor for Echo that semester.  Seeing as how I had already put together a full schedule, I applied for and eventually took the position as a (under)paid part of the staff.

As Photography/Illustration Editor I had many responsibilities regarding visuals within the issue, one of which included the task of assigning each of the image concepts — for the respective stories/sections of the magazine — to be produced by Columbia students studying said field.

Working with the writers and editorial/faculty staff creating the ideas for each story was always an enjoyable and productive creative brainstorming endeavor.  Finding people that showed interest in creating these photos/illustrations was challenging in it’s own right, but I normally had a good initial response from those considering.  I mean, you’d get your own work, in the field that you’re currently studying and trying to make a name for yourself in, published, for free and 30,000 copies are to be distributed throughout the Loop to — in essence — get your name out there.  Potentially for the first time, depending on experience/past work.  So, why not, right?

A lot of people jumped at the opportunity.  In some cases two or three people at the same storie’s visual concept.  But when it came down to actually doing the work assigned and turning it in, I came to be astonished at the number of people that “never got around to it” or “couldn’t make the time to complete the task.”  More often than not, this was occurring within my pool of freelancers; over and over again as the semester went by.  I even randomly ran into one of them on the sidewalk who had been ignoring my calls and not responding to my emails, even though he had expressed a decent amount of interest in helping out.  I offered to reassign this person — including others who were either struggling or losing interest — in effort of finding something they’d be more interested in working on for the issue. I truly wanted to help all of them get involved, and namely gain exposure.  So, I talked with this person for awhile about personal style and interests, and we came to agree on another assignment, which eventually was unfortunately added to the long list of those that would remain incompleted and not turned in.

Semesters’ may have been busy, or potentially more important homework took the cake for most.  Regardless, working with a group of unreliable student freelancers was extremely frustrating and forcefully put me in the position of creating multiple images in a very short and hurried period of time.  *Note, not all of the freelancers fit this mold, but it was a majority of my original list of those who’d qualify for contributing.  And it was rather hectic, to say the least, during the last few weeks leading up to turning in all the media-related files for that semester’s issue.

I can only hope that people within the working industry — whom I’d assume (although you never should) would care more about their work — will be much more reliable than my past experiences, but I’m not going to get my hopes up by any means.

-Nick

(Sidenote - I went to the Columbia website to find photos of the issue I worked on [Fall 2007] to use for this post, and although I couldn’t find a photo of the cover, I did discover a bunch of the stories I shot for that issue now online accompanied by my photos.  BUT THERE’S NO ATTRIBUTION TO THE PHOTOGRAPHER(S), ONLY THE WRITER(S)!  What the <expletive>!?)