"Rigorous curriculum"...really?

That in itself is a huge part of the education, splitting workload and time management within a team environment. I have a few strategies that may work. Sort of like a divide and conquer methodology, where everyone has to present to each other their specialist area in the area of study, so that it helps a the rest of the team catch up and improves the presentation skills of the 'expert'. Since everyone will have different core skills, there is an opportunity for everyone to do that.

wait till you get to school. divide and conquer sometimes works, but sometimes you need to do it together or the whole won't work out correctly.

And sometimes - seems like often lately - the projects don't divide evenly along functional lines.

I would agree with Aau. There is no point planning a strategy. Depends on who you work with and their styles, plus the project. In the whole it teaches you one main skill that you need. The art of being very, very flexible and quick to react.

Yep, understood

Although currently i'm juggling 11 different projects at the same time in the office (leading some, consulting on others). So hopefully that is good practise

Hey - don't worry (I may overreact to the embarrassed emoticon - I don't like it). It is something you wouldn't know! Teams can really vary. I have been really lucky with my main study group, others I know have found the group more work than the projects. It is a great way that you have to learn people skills, and having ideas about how to get them to work is a great thing. The thing you need to manage is getting the right method for the people, and sometimes that isn't going to be the best way to do the project.

My friends study group had five people to work on two projects with a three day deadline. It seemed like some things might work until three of them were out of the country until the next week recruiting, and you find you have a lot more to do than you first thought, and all "team" strategies are blown up without any reason. Considering you have to work with these people for the rest of the semester, and many of them are your friends by now, you end up with some perverse solutions. As long as everyone is OK with the solution, you run with it. That kind of thing happens all the time, and that is why I say the flexibility part is most helpful to getting things done.

Don't get me wrong, dividing work can be great. But sometimes you only have two double line-spaced sides, and the result would end up a mess. So you get used to doing very little bar discussion sometimes, and other times writing a fifteen page model summary on your own at 2am. Like last night.