Project 1: Cohort Showcase (Whole Group)

Our cohort's first group deliverable was a website representing all eighteen of us — built in under three days, mostly around day jobs and a live storm warning that sent us home early one night.

I volunteered for the Web team, not as team lead — I know from experience that leading a team well means delegating, and a team without much shared technical background isn't one I could delegate build work to. That distinction mattered more than I expected: I ended up doing lead-level coordination without the role, which is its own lesson about naming what you're actually taking on.

Early decisions moved fast: an intake form modeled on my own portfolio's structure, a platform choice that had to be reversed mid-build once its limitations became clear, and a template system built to scale to eighteen near-identical profile pages without eighteen rounds of rework. The hardest stretch was the night we had to leave campus early, and thus live collaboration, due to storm warnings — I used the unplanned time to build out a real foundation: page structure, brand-consistent styling, a tracking sheet mapping every teammate to their page and their submission status. It wasn't required of me. It was the difference between the team critiquing something concrete the next morning versus starting from nothing.

The rest of the week was a steady stream of late additions — a demographics section, a resources list, image formatting fixes, AI-generated content that needed a manual pass to match our brand — each small, none of them individually hard, but cumulatively a real test of pacing and priority-setting under a fixed deadline. I caught one meaningful gap myself: confirming the final link actually worked in a logged-out, incognito view before submission, which is the kind of check that's easy to skip when everyone's exhausted and confident.

What stays with me isn't the technical work — it's the emotional real estate a group project takes up when you care more about the outcome's quality than the deadline requires. I'm proud of what shipped. I also learned something honest about my own threshold: I do better work, and stay more regulated, when I've clearly named what I'm responsible for and what I'm not — a distinction I let blur here, and won't next time.

**Tools: **Google Sites, Google Sheets, Claude Design, Figma, Imgur, Visual Studio Code