Ethics is Key

 

This year, I have had the privilege to serve on the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) National Committee as the Vice President of Professional Development. In this position, I have had the opportunity to work with student-run firms across the country as well as many other professionals in the public relations field. Part of my job is assisting these firms in anything that they need as well as help other PRSSA chapters start their own firms if they do not have one established already.

Another large part of my job is educating members on ethics in the industry. This past month of September has been ethics month. I have had a plethora of different projects going on this month that have been super fun as well as very stressful. I started off the month with a Twitter chat alongside our organization’s Vice President of Digital Communications. We asked a couple of questions on Twitter to members of the organization regarding ethics and we were able to receive tons of great feedback.

This Friday, I will be performing an Instagram live session with our Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. We are going to be talking about how diversity and inclusion plays a key role in ethics within the public relations industry. This should be fun and hopefully we get members that join to watch as well as ask us questions.

My project that I am most excited about is the announcement of our ethics competition. This competition is new this year and is hopefully going to be a great outlet for students to learn about and engage with ethics. Students are presented with an ethical case and they must write an article that states why this is an ethical dilemma and how it could be solved. The winner will have their article published on the PRSA site, which would be really great to put on a resume in the future and in a portfolio. 

Ethics is usually overlooked because it isn’t a really fun topic to talk about or learn, but I am hoping that these different projects will help change that mindset for the future. This year has been an extreme example of ethics and dilemmas in every industry, so I am hoping that ethics is on more people’s radars than usual. By ethics being on more peoples’ radars, they will want to get the education necessary in order to prevent ethical dilemmas in the future.