The Group Project

Lucia had been in Manchester for three months when her marketing lecturer announced the group project. Groups of four, two weeks, one presentation: a campaign to persuade students to waste less food on campus. "You will be marked as a group," Dr. Price said, with the faint smile of someone who had seen this go wrong many times before.

Lucia was put with her friend Hannah, whom she had met on her first day in halls, and two people she barely knew: Josh, a tall, sleepy economics student who always sat at the back, and Priya, who sat at the front, answered every question and had already, it was rumored, finished next term's reading.

At their first meeting, in a noisy cafe near the library, nobody could come up with a single idea. They sat around a table covered in coffee cups and stared at a blank page. Josh suggested they think about it over the weekend and meet again on Monday. Everyone agreed, partly because it was Friday afternoon and partly because none of them wanted to be the first to say something stupid.

On Monday, Josh did not turn up. He sent a message an hour later saying that he had overslept, and could they put the meeting off until Wednesday? Priya replied immediately that they could not. Then, without asking anyone, she created a shared document with a timetable, a list of tasks and a name next to each one. Lucia was in charge of research. Hannah was doing the design. Josh was down for "statistics and data". Priya had given herself the script, the slides and the presentation itself.

"She's taking over," Hannah complained that evening, while they were cooking pasta in the shared kitchen of their halls. "Nobody voted for her." Lucia was not so sure. "Someone has to organize it," she said. "If we wait for Josh, we'll be presenting next year." Hannah looked at her as if she had changed sides in the middle of a football match, and they ate the rest of their pasta in an uncomfortable silence.

The second week was worse. Priya kept rewriting the parts other people had done. Hannah's posters came back with comments in red. Josh had not done anything at all, and kept promising that he would catch up at the weekend. Hannah and Lucia were hardly speaking. On Thursday, five days before the deadline, there was a meeting in a small study room that ended with Hannah standing up, saying "I can't work like this," and walking out. It was the closest Lucia had ever come to falling out with a friend.

That night, Lucia could not sleep, so at two in the morning she went down to the kitchen to make some toast. Josh was there, sitting at the table with his laptop, surrounded by empty cans of energy drink. Lucia had not even known he lived in the same building. "Couldn't sleep either?" he asked. Then, slightly embarrassed, he turned his screen towards her.

It was a spreadsheet. For eleven nights, Josh had been going to the university dining hall at closing time and counting what was thrown away, with the permission of the kitchen staff. He had weighed it, photographed it and broken it down by type of food. Half of what students threw away, it turned out, was bread. "I didn't want to say anything until I knew it was useful," he said. "I'm terrible at meetings. I'm much better at bins."

The next morning, Lucia asked everyone to meet in the cafe where they had started. She showed them Josh's figures. Priya went quiet for a long time, and then said, "This is better than anything I've written." Hannah looked at the photos of the bread and laughed. "I know what the posters should look like," she said. For the first time, all four of them were actually listening to each other.

They spent the weekend getting on with it. Hannah designed a poster with a mountain of bread and the line "Don't take more than you'll eat". Priya rewrote the script around Josh's numbers. Lucia found research showing that smaller plates made people waste less. Josh, under protest, agreed to present the data himself.

They got the highest mark in the class. Dr. Price even asked if she could show the campaign to the university catering department. That evening, Hannah and Lucia cooked pasta again, and this time they invited Josh and Priya, and they argued cheerfully about everything, from football to politics, until well after midnight. Nobody wasted any food.