Project 01 Reflection

For our first project, Jack Myers and I wrote a code of ethics for Notre Dame engineering students. Our code had three main components which we believe encapsulates all the necessary attributes to be a successful and ethical engineering student at Notre Dame.  The first category is integrity, and has codes detailing how students should act both inside and outside the classroom to maintain high moral standards.  The next section is community, which details how students can contribute to both the academic community and the more general human community in an ethical and productive way.  Our last section was learning, and it detailed how students should conduct themselves in a learning environment like Notre Dame to maximize their takeaway, and also how they should retain their intellectual curiosity throughout their lifetime.

 

I think our code did a very good job at addressing a number of common situations that engineering students often find themselves in, and detailing how to deal with those situations ethically.  While we tried to include more general guidelines, the majority of our code revolves around issues faced in the classroom. I think it could be improved by adding more general guidelines for how to conduct oneself at college in general, without focusing on coursework.  The reason we chose not to include more general guidelines is that there are so many different experiences students have at college, and Jack and I felt that by setting guidelines for only things we’ve experienced outside the classroom, we would potentially alienate readers who did not have similar experiences.  However, we were confident that many people could relate to what we have experienced in the classroom, and that is why we chose to focus on that.

 

I think codes of ethics are very useful.  Like I alluded to above, they are not holistic and do not address every situation an individual may find themselves in.  However, they do provide a basic moral framework. People may be able to use the code to deduce what to do in a situation, even if it is not expressly talked about within a certain code.  I also enjoyed this exercise from a personal standpoint because it made me reflect on my time at Notre Dame, and how ethically I was both inside and outside the classroom.  Reflection is very important for personal growth, so because of that, I thought writing the code was very beneficial to me.