Ethical Principles

1. Just because what you do is legal it does not mean it is ethical.

2. Do not do anything that you would not want others to know (about you), or do something to others that would not want to be done to you.

3. The quality of the work you do does not only portray you but the whole company, so keep up a high work ethic.

4. If you have a problem with someone try to resolve it directly or use the appropriate channels if it is not possible instead of going behind one’s back.

5. Respect others to receive respect.

Elevator Speech

Before I even started to work on this speech, it took me a long time to figure out what I would like to talk about for such a short time. After many ideas, I did stay with the recommended one. I tried to talk about myself, and I tried to sell myself for a position.

First, I figured I try to see what comes out in one minute without preparing. It was a disaster. Nothing really came to my mind, and even what came sounded very confused. I was very surprised, because previously, I had to talk about myself during interviews, and I never really had such a hard time and did well. This time, it was not that easy.

So, I started making a list of things to talk about. I made three main groups of things to sell myself: education, experience and personality. I tried to list many things for each and write some partial sentences.

The next challenge was to actually speak it and keep it under or close to one minute. It tried it and repeated the exercise several times, but it was not great. I cut some of the things to keep it closer to a minute, but even then, it was a little longer.

When I was ready with the content, I asked my girlfriend to listen to me and then record it to me. I told her that I wanted to practice it first, and that I was very nervous and uncomfortable about it, which was very surprising again with my previous interview experiences. She kind of tricked me and recorded it during one of the practice runs, but I was glad. I guess I was still not as nervous as would have been live. I have to keep repeating that during a real interview and conversation I never feel this way… I guess this was just too artificial.

Anyway, it was recorded and was as good as it gets for now. I was still shaky in my voice and was not as confident and concise sounding as I expected it, but at least I learned something about myself and about recording my speech. It was kind of nice to gather some ideas for a short conversation about me and hearing my voice (and my accent) back, too. :-)

Elevator Speech

Personality Testing

I have not done too many personality tests previously, and I do not really like them anyway. I can see their place in some areas, like where the number of participants is very large, but I believe in a face-to-face approach to learning about others.

This class was not the first time I filled out a test like this. I have taken general and sport psychology classes before, where the same concept came up. I do not remember taking any personality tests before college. Most of the tests I have taken yielded results that were close to what I expected. I think tests results are matching up to what we think about ourselves, because we might be already thinking about the outcome of the test during taking it and try to influence it that direction. It might only be true for me, but I have felt this way before, when I was working on one of these tests.

Mostly because I believe we consciously and subconsciously manipulate our answers, I only see their importance as supplementary sources, and not primary ones to depict a person. I would not solely rely on personality tests to hire or learn about people if I were working as a supervisor. They could be useful in a situation, where many people participate and the outcome will not have any serous effect on them (employment-wise).

On another note, I did have an interesting experience with a personality test before. I filled out one of those Type A versus Type B personality tests. I viewed myself as a Type B, and my results also showed that I was one also. After I did the test, I have thought about it for a long time, realizing that I have many traits of Type A personality, too. I kept recognizing and seeing it in myself during everyday activities. After all, I settled with being a mixed A and B personality, but I found it fascinating that this question stayed in my mind for a relatively long time. I guess these test might have an even more important role in learning about ourselves rather than employers learning about us. Maybe there is also more truth in these tests that I give credit for.