What do I believe?

My time at North Central College has included an evolution of my ethical values and a massive increase in my leadership capabilities.  When I started I had only my moral instincts telling me some actions were right or wrong, and while I had the respect of my friends, I was not yet able to command attention from anyone else.  Today, on the other hand, I am able to firmly articulate why an action is acceptable or not according to a variety of theories, and I am able to project an aura of authority regardless of my level of anxiety.  I will always have more to learn, my time at North Central has forged me into someone with far stronger morals and has honed my ability to articulate those morals and to lead by example.

            Being a student of political science has forced me to consider the implications of my ethical convictions more carefully than I find most people do.  It is easy to state a moral point of view, but it is difficult to acknowledge all of its effects when applied on a large scale.  As a political scientist, I do not have the luxury of ignoring the possible downsides of my values.  For this reason I appreciate the writings of Immanuel Kant.  Kant forces the reader to consider every moral principle and its effects if applied to everyone in society.  I do not entirely consider myself to be a deontologist, but I have adopted the universalization aspect of Kant’s thought process as a valuable piece of my own.

I would not have learned this method nearly as well as I did without the instruction of the North Central philosophy department, especially Dr. Moosa.  Furthermore, I would not have been as incentivized to learn under Dr. Moosa without the Leadership, Ethics, and Values program to encourage me in developing my passing interest into a lifelong passion.  Philosophy had previously been an enigma to me, with a mishmash of Greek names and confusing questions, but at North Central the fog cleared and I began to engage with the material.  As I continued, engagement became true understanding, and I exchanged my crude moral intuitions for a developed and evolving worldview.

My ethical development has aided me in my growth as a leader as well.  As a member of Orientation Staff and as a First Year Mentor, I have been able to practice applying my values to the real world.  Mentoring new students requires a level of self-awareness that can be difficult to maintain without the training philosophy provides.  My ability to listen patiently and attentively to problems and create solutions based on the students’ needs – not to mention my willingness to do so – was absolutely improved by the ethics courses I took.  Being there for the students and supporting them as they made their transition to college was a fundamentally moral journey for me.  I have long loved The Lord of the Rings, and I take inspiration for my own leadership from it.  In particular, I try to emulate Aragorn as well as I can.  He holds fast to his principles and leads by example, giving hope to others even when despair claws at his spirit.  While I doubt I will be in the same end-of-the-world sort of scenario he experiences, I still seek to inspire those around me by embodying the essence of what a good person should be.  As I have learned more about ethics, my increased knowledge and vocabulary have given me the tools to do so more effectively than I even thought possible.

One area which pushed my ethical and leadership abilities to their very limits was my third year on Orientation Staff.  I was an Orientation Team Leader (OTL), planning the orientation events with my fellow OTLs and then leading the staff through them.  I was able to keep the staffers maintaining professional appearances and positive attitudes to the public despite our constant exhaustion.  This I achieved by both reminding them of the duty to which they agreed and by setting an example they could follow.  Staffers respected me for my dedication to the new students and for never asking a member of staff to do something I would not ask myself to do.  However, the troubles arose not from the public events, but from the inner functions of Orientation Staff management.  When this happened I learned a valuable lesson in leadership: when to get out.  For my remaining time I continued to lead as I always had: by setting an example of what I wanted Orientation Staff to be.