My Definition: The ability to incorporate society's collective acceptence of moral believes in a way that doesn't waiver my capasity to make decisions and operate in an ever-changing world.

 

My Criteria: Exercising proper ethics requires me to always live out what I identify as my personal morals and the general moral compass that sets the standard for how everyone in our society should present themselves.  Acting ethically is not just a 'every now-and-then' competency, it's and 'all-the-time' competency.

 

Reflection: Internship - Recording Hours

 

In the spring of my senior year, I went on an assurance and audit internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Fort Worth, TX. The majority of the internship required long hours at our client's corporate office while on an audit team performing a variety of substantive procedures. Audit, in general, can be complex, confusing, and require many questions from the interns.

 

Luckily for me, I was place on two great audit teams with associates and seniors who were eager to answer any questions I had. Although I often had questions on how to complete certain tasks, one question I was supposed to ask my supervisor every day was, "How long do you want me to work today?" 

 

The supervisors had an obligation to manage the balance of intern hours worked within a week in order to stay within budget. Although it may sound trivial, intern hours can get expensive for the firm once we dip into overtime. Regardless, it was an easy line of communication with my supervisors as long as I was on the job site. However, where many of us interns had to use our best judgement was during intern events and helping our home office with recruiting tasks. 

 

There were many blurry lines on what we could call "working remotely" or "admin hours." The project lead or HR supervisor would sometimes give us instructions on what to record for hours, but often in my intern group chat, other interns would alter the interpretation of the instructions or make up guidelines that were more favorable for their paychecks. Even phrases like, "The firm's got so much money, recording a full eight hours won't hurt anybody." and "the firm made us believe we'd be working at least 40 hours a week. We can round our hours up to 40."

 

The temptation was there for me to rationalize to myself, "Well, I'm not getting any clear instruction, and how these other inters are explaining it does make sense." Additionally, it would be difficult to turn down a fatter paycheck when other interns are reaping those benefits.

 

Nevertheless, I found it important for my own ethical principles to be honest with my hours: an hour worked means an hour earned. I had to shut off all the temptation I was seeing from the group chats and hearing from other interns. 

 

After this experience, I like to relate it to Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? In Christensen's book, he describes that 100% is better than 98%: always staying ethical is better than staying ethical most of the time. Allowing myself to make minor ethical 'slip-ups' makes myself vulnerable to a slippery slope of future detrimental unethical behavior. I don't believe that increasing my hours would've led me to a life of fraud and unethical behavior, but I do believe the best way to ensure a good-principled life is to aim to be 100%.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reflection: ENDS 101 Project Group

 

We called ourselves, "The Creative Six."  Although we didn't know each other at the start of our project team, we were all determined to reach success in our design process class.  Two traits we wanted to be associated with were being timely and being genuine with each other.  We sought trust among ourselves.  Yet, we didn't fully understand that we would also want trust outside our group.  

 

Upon our second meeting, we were assigned to come up with six brand new innovations.  This first project represented a significant chunck out of our grade, and we felt we weren't already the strongest at innovation.  One thing that surprised us the most was how often other groups  plagarised other ideas off the internet.  It was very tempting for us to do because we were testing the limits of our "timely" value.  Nevertheless, we started to believe keeping a strong ethical foundation was necessary for us to gain the most out of course.  On the last week of the project, we stayed up long hours as we tried to piece together our innovations from scratch.  At the end of the course, we recieved the grades we wanted, yet we were never recognized for always acting ethically; in fact, some of the groups that plagarised made higher grades then us.  However, we all felt good about the decisions we made, and did in fact learn more about the design process.  Routinely acting ethically showed that it was worth it, even if the benefits weren't always direct.