Professional Development

1. Ethical Issues in My Profession: One of the biggest ethical issues in my profession is the advent of green technology, like chemical fuels and alternative energies. Within the global industry, this means that chemical engineers are going to be looking to reduce the amount of greenhouse emissions worldwide (Common to things like the Kyoto Treaty). Business and life within the United States are affected by this ethical issue because business now has to be done in a more green way. Bill paying has moved online, gas is being infused with ethanol, and so on, so that everything within our lives is becoming greener.
2. Educational Breadth as Professional Development: The need for a broad education experience is important to understand the impact of engineering and business solutions in a global and societal context. Study abroad is important to understand how companies in other countries perform tasks, and how business and engineers affect their society. In the future I will try to study abroad, and take any courses on global businesses.
3. Lifelong Learning, Continuing Education as Professional Development: Life long learning is important to any person in society. Abilities to engage in lifelong learning include reading books, attending professional conferences and lectures, and watching television programs. This is needed to compete in the future, because chemical engineering is always changing, and if one is not always learning new things, they will ultimately fall behind.
4. The Social Environment of Professional Life: It is very important to have knowledge of contemporary issues related to the global economy, because chemical industry is not an industry within a nutshell. Chemical engineers work for companies that have a global reach, so having knowledge of issues within the global economy is pertinent to being able to perform well in business. Within chemical engineering, both political and social issues can dictate things like oil refining and the advent of green technology. Economic issues deal with how well the economy is doing, which is turn can dictate how a product will sell. All of these issues affect the day to day life within the United States, because people are the ones who dictate the political climate, the social standards, and the economic output of the country.
5. Functioning on Multi-Disciplinary Teams: When I am a member of a multi-disciplinary team, first I try to observe members in the group, and to determine who is the strongest in certain areas. For example, in a team of two engineers and one business student like this one, I knew the business student would be good at presenting our presentation with the German students, since the presentation would be talking about business topics. Second, I try to be a leader within the group, because I feel like it is one of my skills as a person. Leadership has been a value to me, and I try to let it show when I am working in a group. The challenges in a cross-functional group mainly arise from how in depth the group’s task is within a certain area. For example, this group’s task was to put together a business presentation, which created the challenge of having the engineers learn the business terms and models, and challenged the business student to be patient with us while we learned these things.