Consider Me Ethical

Catherine Paneral

Jour 4470

Blog Five

Oh dear lord. Where do I begin?

I really liked the case studies. If people complained about them, they are dumb. I looked forward to the presentation days every time. The best way to learn ethics, other than experiencing them yourself, is to study ethical cases.

What I enjoyed most about the case study presentations was that I had never even heard about 75 percent of the topics. I had no idea Cracker Barrel wouldn’t employ gays and lesbians. I didn’t know Blockbusters “End of Late Fees” wasn’t really the end of late fees. If you would have asked me who Aaron Feuerstein or Malden Mills were, I would have asked “Who?”

4470 was like a two for one class. I learned so much about ethics and what you should and shouldn’t do but in addition to that I learned about a lot of history that has happened over the years. It made me really sad when I felt like a group didn’t go very in depth because I always wanted to know more. I like hearing every little detail.

I liked the lectures. It was like story time and story time is my most favorite thing in the world. I could seriously just sit and listen to an interesting lecture all day long. I liked learning about the privacy laws and the code of ethics. I feel like a lot of the laws and ethics we learned about should be common sense, should being the key word. It blows my mind that not everyone follows these set guidelines.

I learned that some of the students are amazing writers…and some that I have no clue how they got this far in college. 

I became good friends with my group member and I am extremely grateful for that. Those boys made our group projects so much easier because we all got along and everyone pulled their own weight. But overall they were seriously the best group I have ever had.

I really liked Sheri Broyles presentation on subliminal advertising. Advertising is interesting to me but I think I would die if I would have studied it. It was nice to get a little taste lecture about it without having to actually pay for the class or do any assignments, ha.

I know the trolls spamming the class hashtag was annoying but I learned so much from the experience. I followed the Twitter feed as everything was happening and it was crazy to me. I had to wrap my head around the fact that in the PR world this could be a real thing and I would have to know how to react.

I am going to miss the class. I don’t feel like I could ever learn enough about ethics and the law. So many of the cases have different dependencies for making decisions and I while I personally think they should have all been easy decisions to make, I learned how to really apply communitarianism and utilitarianism. I realized how many of the decisions were probably not easy to make, especially in the moment, but you have to weigh your options and make sacrifices.

Advertising and PR are not easy and now I feel like they are constantly being challenged by anyone and everyone. While I am still very terrified of being an adult practicing PR in the real world I at least feel prepared enough to not crash and burn. And if it doesn’t work out then I can always come back for grad school.