Oh boy story time and hopefully a life lesson

If you don’t want to read this long wall of text then I don’t blame you.
So I have this Elementary design class for Mechanical Engineering and last Thursday I had a presentation to do with my group for a Rube Goldberg project.
As some background info, we were last with basically the worst looking project in comparison to everyone else. In this project, the ending step was to mix Diet Coke
and Mentos. To make a long story short, our delivery system to mix the two prematurely activated and the whole bottle exploded in my face.
SO after THAT whole debacle,
Come today we get our grades, which were all publicly displayed on the board in front of the whole class
93, 99. 94, 95, 96, 81
Who got the 81? My Group. Not a shabby score in the slightest but I really wanted to get that A and in comparison to everyone else (as I expected) our score was the worst. What else was listed was our peer review score from the other groups with ours being the lowest at a 43/50 and pretty much everyone else had a 50.
So the professor (bless him) decides to out the class saying that they didn’t give my group enough points because it didn’t work apparently and to him it did.
And honestly, it actually worked in the preparation before
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C0LFUSEFls
I felt like the whole mishap with the Diet Coke exploding in my face was the main focus and i dont think anyone saw the test that we ran with our machine. Granted it didn’t work like in the video because most of it was soaked in Diet Coke.
So on average, the groups gave us a 20/30 which didn’t seem fair to him.
So he asked everyone to revise it immediately after he talked about the scores however they saw fit.
Now during that whole speech, I was becoming increasingly frustrated because I felt like every other group was insensitive to what happened that day. Even more compounded because my group being last, our project sucking in comparison and it was 4pm everyone wanted to go home. Of course they gave us a low grade but the way it happened didn’t sit very well with me.
That’s my perception of what their low grades said to me. So naturally I think it was justified in being irritated not just because of the grades, but the group’s overall showing for this project. It was absolute garbage.
During the presentation, in hopes of saving face, I talked up the whole project and I was also the one that was blasted in the face. Talk is cheap. haha To make matters worse, I am the poster face for our group because I have the best speaking skills so I wanted to actually keep it interesting so when we went out to run the machine it wasn’t really boring. My group was also composed of the people in the class who didn’t have a team at all. Hence our name, (the) Free Agents. Their experience in Engineering was limited as well as their speaking skills so I had to step up and be the leader.
So I feel pretty damn embarrassed because for one, the Professor felt so bad for our group that he felt it was necessary to petition the class to reconsider their decision. I thank him for that, but he can never do that again at any point for the rest of the semester.
Second of all, OUR PROJECT SUCKED DICK. So I’m mad now and I want my group to feel just as bad as I do. I was talking to my other friend and he was right in telling me that if this was the real world, my team would have been fired. Straight up.
And I really don’t think my group understands that at this moment. The only thing that I want to do now in our final project, making a cannon to launch a projectile, is show up prepared with something that will beat the living shit out of all of them. For one to restore my group’s pride and to inspire us any maybe the other class that even those who are left out can do extraordinary things.
Last Thursday was a complete and utter nightmare for me.
I never want it to happen again.
If you took the time to read this, thanks a lot. Send me a message if you like because I really want to know who took the time to read this. Also, I hope this story motivates you into putting out the best work that you can despite adversity at every corner because in the end it will be worth it. At the end of this project, for sure I’ll update everyone, even if I don’t finish in the top spot, I want to stand proud knowing that I put out my best effort and not something half-assed.
I guess my tenacity is something that motivates me to be an Engineer.
No where but up from here.