So I am in my last semester of grad school, and instead of a thesis, we have a capstone project, working with a client etc etc. There are about 30 of us in the class, and we've broken into smaller groups of 5-6 people to work on a single aspect of the project. Each small group has a leader that meets with the leaders of the other groups on a weekly basis to catch each other up, bounce ideas off one another, etc. For my group, I am that leader.

The leader from another group thinks her work/aspect of the project is far superior to what we are doing. She does not hesitate to tell me that our portion of the project is simply "fluff" (simply because it is more qualitative than quantitative). Yesterday I was gossiping with a friend (I know, bad me) who is in her smaller group, and the gist of it is that she is always talking about how dumb we are, and how the work we are doing is the worst, ever, and how we should just hand our part of the project over to her because we are obviously incompetent and idiots and not nearly as good as her.

I know that I should obviously say something, because this is an unacceptable attitude to have. We are in the same graduate program, have taken the same classes, so I don't know how she is any more qualified for this part of the project than my group members are. Unfortunately, I am a very non-confrontational person and these sorts of things are extremely difficult. Advice? I am normally a very calm, cool & collected person, but this situation is making me really angry!!