Essay on "Political Election Have Defied My Expectations"

Essay 5 pages (1861 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

political election have defied my expectations for the American political and social landscape. Quite honestly, I did not believe that there was a realistic possibility that the United States would have anything other than white male presidents during my lifetime. In fact, even before the results of the election were known, one could tell that America was ready for a major change, as one party's candidate for president was an African-American male, and the other party's candidate was a man described as a maverick by his own party, who had repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to break with party politics in order to accomplish his goals for America. As a result, though I have been encouraged to be realistic in this discussion of my future, I must warn the reader that this paper will be optimistic, because I am more optimistic about America than I have been in years. Therefore, I hope that the reader will not find my optimism to be unrealistic, but will embrace, like I have, the basic foundation of the American dream, which is that, with enough hard work and effort, anyone can do anything in this country. I think that my plans for my life reflect that attitude.

Career

Currently, I am a manager for General Electric (GE). I have been working with GE for 18 years, and have been consistently moving up in the company while employed by GE. Unlike some companies, GE has a strong reputation for rewarding and encouraging employee work efforts and innovation. GE strives to promote its own employees, rather than recruiting from outside sources. However, like many other large companies, GE wants its management-level employees to have the education necessary to back-up their positions. Therefore, in order to continue advancing in the company, I determined that I needed to obtain my undergraduate degree. I am currently a senior working on my undergraduate degree, which will enable me to advance in the company. In the next ten years, I will have completed by undergraduate degree and a degree in business management, and hope to have achieved a position as a business leader in one of GE's divisions.

If I am to attain my desired position as a business leader, I have to demonstrate that I have the necessary conflict resolution skills for that position. As a manager, I have come to see that a large part of my job is resolving differences between people. My employees may have conflicts with their coworkers or disputes with company policies and procedures. As a major corporation, GE has to carefully protect its financial interests, but it also has an obligation to look out for the health and welfare of its workers. While GE does have an internal procedure in place to help mediate disputes, I would like to push for the program to be more like the one at Coca Cola Enterprises, which enjoys tremendous employee support. Because that program was developed an instituted by a non-lawyer with an MBA, I feel like I could take similar steps, such as studying forms of alternative dispute resolution, to help shape GE's program and help make it an industry leader.

Education

Being a non-traditional student has been a challenge. Because I have demands in my life that differ from the demands encountered by the average student, I have sometimes found that my personal and business life have been in conflict with my life as a student. To resolve this issue, I have previously tried very hard to make sure that my personal and business lives do not interfere with my education. I have also tried to make sure that my education and personal life do not have a negative impact on my business life. The problem with such an approach is that it has resulted in me making my personal life the lowest priority as far as time allocation is concerned, which has not been good for me or for my family and does not reflect my values. Therefore, I have determined that I can no longer take that approach. Moreover, because the conflict between business life, personal life, and education is generally about time, a very limited resource, I have determined that I may need to take longer to graduate than I would actually like to do, so that I can have sufficient time to devote to the other areas of my life. As a result, I envision myself completing my bachelor's and master's degrees within the next ten years, but I am fully prepared for it to be another five years before I have completed my master's program.

Personal

My personal life is the most difficult area for me to forecast. I am a husband and father of two children: my son Hayden, who is 5 1/2 and my daughter Kennedy, who is 20 months old. I am very actively involved in parenting my children and know that aspect of my life will not change. That means that in ten years, I will be teaching my son Hayden to drive and worrying about things like training bras and boyfriends for my daughter. I know from my own experience as a teenager, that parenting a pre-teen and a teenager will require me to use all of my conflict resolution skills. My children are going to think that I am being unreasonable and overprotective when I try to establish limits. I know that my role is to be their parent, not their friend, and I have no problem with the concept of establishing limits. However, I also know that it can be absolute torture to live in a household with an angry teenager. Therefore, I will make my best effort to explain my decisions to my children, and to listen when they disagree with me. I do not hope to encourage arguments about every decision that I make, but I also want to be a parent who makes decisions based on the best information and not because it perpetuates a family tradition. Although I know that my children and I will still disagree about what is best for them, by showing them that I am reasonable and am not making arbitrary or capricious decisions, I hope to help teach them reasoning and help them respect the decisions that I do make.

Unfortunately, my plan for my marriage is not as concrete as my plan for my children. I am currently married to my high school sweetheart, but our marriage has been in trouble for the past few years. Things have gotten sufficiently bad for us to begin seriously discussing the possibility of divorce. Neither my wife nor I are quite ready to give up on our marriage, but we are also unwilling to continue living as we have lived. Therefore, we intend to start counseling to see if our marriage is salvageable, and, if it is not, to learn how to transition from spouses to co-parents in a way that will best protect our children. I am too personally involved in my relationship with my wife to think that I can objectively apply my conflict resolution skills to the problems that we have. That is why I have sought the assistance of objective professionals to help manage the conflict. My wife and I are seeking the help of a counselor and we are committed to the idea of mediation, in the event that we do divorce. I am determined that the counseling will work, at least to make us good co-parents. Therefore, in ten years time, I see myself working as a team member with my wife to raise our children. In addition, if we are still married, I see myself in a stronger marriage with better communication, because we both know that we deserve a better marriage than the one that we have, now, and we are both willing to work for change. If we are not married, I see me and my wife as friends, because she is one of the more valuable people in my life, and I will work hard to preserve that friendship, even if the romantic nature of our relationship changes.

Environmentally

Unfortunately, I do not have a positive prediction about where the United States will be, environmentally, in ten years. While Americans have shown a willingness to change some of their behaviors, like increasing recycling, exploring alternative forms of energy, and ending factory farming (at least in California), the reality is that even if all emissions were to end, it will take years to mitigate the impact of global warming. I predict that in ten years the world will have seen more major hurricanes and tsunamis, and that those who are arguing against global warming will begin to accept the science behind the theory. However, I also understand that if I want the environmental picture to be different in 50 years, I have to make changes today. I hope to have my house converted to solar panels, which should supplement about 80% of my power usage. We… READ MORE

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