Opportunity is a situation that you can find yourself in with two choices: take advantage of said opportunity or choose an alternative to the opportunity. Opportunity is important for doing well in school. Opportunity is important for landing your first job, as well as subsequent jobs. Without opportunity, I wouldn't be writing this blogpost about opportunity for an economics class at a competitive, highly ranked university. And even with opportunities, if I didn't take advantage of them, I wouldn't be writing this blogpost. When given the chance to put yourself in a better position, why wouldn't you take advantage?
While opportunity can put yourself in a better position than you were before, it's often a choice between something ethical and something unethical. Imagine you find a wallet on the ground. This wallet contains $100 in cash and the license of the person the wallet presumably belong to. You have a few option in this scenario. You could take advantage of the situation, do the unethical thing and find yourself with $100 more than you had before. You could do the right thing and contact the person who the wallet belongs to. Or you could just leave the wallet and pretend like nothing happened. The opportunist choice would be to take the money and find yourself in a better position than you were before. However, I'd imagine most people would go against what is "best" for them and find the person who the wallet belongs to and return it to that person. I can give several reasons why you should choose against opportunity: it's the right thing to do, you would want someone to return your wallet if you lost it, bad karma (if you're into that sort of thing) and maybe the person will reward you for returning the wallet with more than what was in the wallet in the first place. These reasons, not counting the last one, boil down to acting ethical. The last reason, however, is passing up a current opportunity for the possibility of something better in the future.
I found myself with a choice this past summer that was basically a choice between taking advantage of an opportunity right in front of me or waiting and choosing something that would probably help me out to a greater extent in the future. My choice was between taking a few summer courses for a minor that wouldn't really improve my resume or accepting an internship that would look very good on my resume and help me secure a job after graduation.
After a few weeks of applying to internships, while figuring out what classes I would have to take and what my future class schedules would look like, I made my choice. I decided to pursue a minor in atmospheric sciences and continue my summer job that has no relation to economics rather than accept an internship that would help me build my resume and appear more attractive to companies after graduation. Looking back a few months on my decision, I do not regret it in the slightest. I may change my mind once I enter the job market after graduation, but for now I am very glad I pursued a minor in atmospheric sciences. The summer class that I took was a once in a lifetime opportunity to chase storms. I made a decision that wasn't ethical but rather a choice between having an experience now versus being in a better position for my future.
Opportunity is a very important element for success in our lives. Opportunity can be boiled down to a choice between two ideas, almost opposite in nature. On one hand, you can choose to do the ethical thing or the unethical thing. On the other hand, you can choose between now and the future. Either way the decision comes down to you and your values that have been shaped throughout your entire life.
You spent a lot of this post writing about opportunity, much less about opportunism. Another word one might consider is serendipity - good fortune. I didn't completely understand the story about the the course on storms, but the way you told the story that you had the chance to take it in the summer was serendipity. Good for you.
ReplyDeleteWas there an ethical issue involved? I couldn't see one from how you told the story. Absent any ethical issue, opportunism isn't really at play.
It may be, and here I'm only guessing, that your parents wanted you to do the internship, but you satisfied your own inclination instead of theirs. That may have made the choice harder, but it still doesn't make it an ethical matter.
There then is the question about being responsible to yourself. It is unclear from what your wrote above, but it didn't seem that you had an internship offer in hand at the time of your choice. And even if you did, widening your own horizons may be as important as preparing for your eventual career. If you had goofed offer that summer and otherwise did nothing, we could agree that would not be the responsible thing to do, but as it is your choice makes sense to me.
So it is an interesting story, but I don't see it tying very well to the prompt.
You're right, there wasn't an ethical issue in my choice between taking an interesting summer course versus working at in internship. There wasn't opportunism involved. If by taking the summer course, another student would be taken out of the course to make room for myself, that would turn it into a situation where opportunism applies. If I choose to take the course then I would be taking someone's spot, turning it into an ethical situation. If I choose to not add the course because letting the other person who already had signed up remain in the course is the right thing to do but not the opportunistic thing to do.
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