L.O.U.D.D.

L.O.U.D.D. was very interesting. The event was based on two of the topics in our class, leadership and ethics. Our spokesman was Dr. Gonzalez and he spoke about how our country is so hungry for leadership. He pointed out that “everything that happens around the world will affect us and that we should be aware about everything going on globally and locally”. After this statement I thought about how I had been ignoring that fact all my life and how important it is for me to be a leader in today’s society.

At the event we were all given name tags that also contained the two sessions that we were assigned to attend. I was assigned to go to an ethics session and a sustainability session and they were both interesting. However, the ethics session was my favorite. We started the session by circling things that we value on a paper we were given that included such values as achievement, accountability, advancement etc. After that we were asked to partner up with the person next to us and discuss our values. I learned that we don’t all have the same values as I had assumed at the beginning of this exercise.

After doing that we saw a clip of What Would you Do? At the beginning of the video a well dressed woman fell in the middle of a busy street in New Jersey and many individuals stopped to help. Then they changed the experiment by replacing the woman with a homeless man and not a lot of people stopped to help. The purpose of the video was to make us think about the assumptions that we make are influenced by our ethics. Another video that we saw was about teenagers who cheat in high school. The video had many statistics about students who cheat and lie, but ironically all 93% of the students who cheated said that they were satisfied with the ethics that they demonstrate and that they didn’t think that they were doing anything bad. After watching the video we discussed about how ethics were implemented a lot more in past generations and that is part of the reason why we prefer to think that we are doing the right thing because we assume that somebody else might be doing it more than us. Another reason for this is because we try to make up explanations for acting inadequately.

I’ve always wanted to be a leader because I think that it’d make me feel good and because I want to help others, but after listening to Dr. Gonzalez’s speech, I learned that leadership is no longer an option for all of us, it’s now a necessity in our everyday life. I also learned that not everybody else believes the same things and because of that we have different values which make our code of ethics differentiate when we compare them to somebody else’s. I always assumed that ethics was based on recognizing what is wrong and right and doing the right thing, but there’s a lot more to that.

This is the shirt they gave us for networking

with others. I love free t-shirts!