Free College Admissions Essays: Human Resources Management :: College Admissions Essays

I am Committed to Human Resources Management The decision for me to become an industrial relations major was not really my own, I have to admit. My uncle, a human resource manager with Welch-Allyn, spent the majority of every holiday gathering throughout my senior year of high school trying to dissuade me from becoming a business major. He would tell me, "This is a rare undergraduate degree and a growing field." Then he would frighten me by saying, "We have very similar personalities, so you would be a fantastic H.R. manager." Eventually he convinced me that it was my best option. And I haven't regretted it. Although I credit my uncle with inspiring my initial decision, my constantly growing interest in this field and desire to continue my education has grown from two sources: the Industrial Relations faculty at LeMoyne and my vocation as a martial arts instructor for almost five years. From my professors, I have learned the practical side of my intended profession: the multitude of laws protecting worker's rights in the workplace, procedures for collective bargaining and arbitration, and how compensation systems function. My job, on the other hand, has helped me acquire the "people" skills that are crucial to being an effective H.R. manager. In the course of a normal workday, I must communicate with a diverse group of people ranging in age from three to seventy-two years old. Each student has unique needs and goals that I must identify and pay attention to. I must constantly evaluate students and give them constructive feedback, walking that fine line between support and criticism. At t he same time, I delegate tasks to the less senior instructors and class helpers, while helping them improve their teaching skills. It is challenging and constantly educational. These two sources, my professors and my job, have succeeded in transforming a disinterested college freshman into a senior who has a focused career path. My ultimate career goal is to be a general human resource manager or recruiter for a high-tech or pharmaceutical company. These are industries in which I foresee great potential for growth in the future. I enjoy every aspect of my major, and I look forward to the variety of tasks and obstacles I will face as an H.R. manager. The prospect of interacting with people on a daily basis appeals to me immensely in a job.

Webster Case

The case suggests that the performance evaluation data (PAS, personnel audit, and the impressions and opinions of the group members) had several problems. From the perspective of the decision-making biases, analyze how the characteristics of the performance data were likely to affect the decisions made by the Carter group. In your analysis, cite specific problems with the data and how they relate to the decision-making biases that we discussed in class.PAS†¢Loss aversion: Webster had a culture that promoted employee loyalty at all costs. â€Å"In more than one instance, Webster had kept an employee long after alcoholism had impaired his or her effectiveness, primarily because of top management’s feeling that the person had no other place to go.† This culture affected the type of feedback granted in the PAS process and skewed the data to show better employee performance on the evaluations than Webster was actually experiencing.†¢Illusion of transparency: Take R ay Pearson as an example, â€Å"Though is performance had been unsatisfactory for at least the last 10 years, he was not given any negative feedback unit the fall of 1974.†Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Anchoring: Webster rank and file suffered from anchoring in the inflated results of their evaluations. Imagine how Ray Pearson’s would have assessed himself he were not overconfident in his performance (which, unfortunately for Ray, was likely a result of his managers’ unwillingness to give truthful feedback).†¢Sampling on the dependent variable: the participation in the PAS evaluation process is poor at best. It could be possible that – notwithstanding the transparency issues – only the good performers submitted evaluations and the poor performers avoided the process altogether.Personnel audit†¢Illusion of transparency bias: while the audit doesn’t create this bias, Jack Bryant’s process fails to effectively resolve discrepancies between a subordin ate’s perceptions of her performance and her manager’s evaluation of performance.Group opinions†¢Confirmation bias: Again, the group has been immersed in a culture that prioritizes years of service over performance. Cecil Stevens leads the discussion with using seniority as the first criteria to make separation decisions. The group likely confronted confirmation bias towards weighting that criterion more heavily when weighting the other criteria (e.g. performance, potential, etc.).†¢Escalation of commitment: Take for example the counter-intuitive message given to Bob Carter by Ike Davis (superior). â€Å"These men have too much service to be treated as you have proposed.† It seems to me that despite Carter’s reasoned desire to demote individuals, the organization â€Å"doubled-down† on its message of loyalty as the most important consideration in making personnel decisions.

Impulse Drive Sub-lightspeed in Star Trek

Trekkies have helped define the science fiction universe, along with the technology that the Star Trek series, books, and movies promise. One of the most sought-after technologies from those shows is the warp drive. That propulsion system is used on the spaceships of many species in the Trekiverse to get across the galaxy in amazingly short times (months or years compared to the centuries it would take at merely the speed of light).  However, theres not always a reason to use warp drive, and so, sometimes the ships in Star Trek  use impulse power to go at sub-light speed. What is Impulse Drive? Today, exploratory missions use chemical rockets to travel through space. However, those rockets have several drawbacks. They require massive amounts of propellant (fuel) and are generally very large and heavy. Impulse engines, like those depicted to exist on the starship Enterprise,  take a slightly different approach to accelerate a spacecraft.  Instead of using chemical reactions to move through  space, they use a nuclear reactor (or something similar) to supply electricity to the engines. That electricity supposedly powers large electromagnets that use the energy stored in the fields to propel the ship or, more likely, superheat plasma that is then collimated by strong magnetic fields and  spit out the back of the craft to accelerate it forward. It all sounds very complex, and it is. Its actually do-able, b ut not with current technology. Effectively, impulse engines represent a step forward from current chemical-powered rockets. They dont go faster than the speed of light, but theyre faster than anything we have today. Its probably only a matter of time before someone figures out how to build and deploy them.   Could We Someday Have Impulse Engines? The good news about someday, is that the basic premise of an impulse drive  is scientifically sound. However, there are some issues to consider. In the films, the starships are able to use their impulse engines to accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light. In order to achieve those speeds, the power generated by the impulse engines has to be significant. Thats a huge hurdle.  Currently, even with nuclear power, it seems unlikely that we could produce sufficient current to power such drives, especially for such large ships. So, thats one problem to overcome. Also, the shows often depict the impulse engines being used in planetary atmospheres and in nebulae, clouds of gas and dust. However, every design of impulse-like drives relies on their operation in a vacuum. As soon as the starship enters a region of high particle density (like an atmosphere or a cloud of gas and dust), the engines would be rendered useless. So, unless something changes (and ye canna change the laws o physics, Captain!), impulse drives remain in the realm of science fiction. Technical Challenges of Impulse Drives Impulse drives sound pretty good, right? Well, there are a couple of problems with their use as outlined in science fiction. One is time dilation:  Any time a craft travels at relativistic speeds, concerns of time dilation arise. Namely, how does the timeline stay consistent when the craft is traveling at near-light speeds? Unfortunately, there is no way around this. Thats why impulse engines are often limited in science fiction to about 25% of the  speed of light  where relativistic effects would be minimal.   The other challenge for such engines is where they operate. They are most effective in a vacuum, but we often see them in Trek as they enter atmospheres or whip through clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The engines as currently imagined wouldnt do well in such environments, so thats another issue that would have to be solved.   Ion Drives Not all is lost, however. Ion drives, which use very similar concepts to impulse drive technology have been in use aboard spacecraft for years. However, due to their high energy use, they are not efficient at accelerating craft very efficiently. In fact, these engines are only used as primary propulsion systems on an interplanetary craft. That means only probes traveling to other planets would carry ion engines. There is an ion drive on the Dawn spacecraft, for example, which aimed at the dwarf planet Ceres.   Since ion drives need only a small amount of propellant to operate, their engines operate continuously. So, while a chemical rocket may be quicker at getting a craft up to speed, it quickly runs out of fuel. Not so much with an ion drive (or future impulse drives). An  ion drive will accelerate a craft for days, months, and years. It allows the spaceship to reach a greater top speed, and thats important for trekking across the solar system. Its still not an impulse engine. Ion drive technology is certainly an application of impulse drive technology, but it fails to match the readily available acceleration ability of the engines depicted in Star Trek and other media. Plasma Engines Future space travelers may get to use something even more promising: plasma drive technology. These engines use electricity to superheat plasma and then eject it out the back of the engine using powerful magnetic fields.  They bear some similarity to ion drives in that they use so little propellant that they are able to operate for long periods of time, especially relative to traditional chemical rockets. However, they are much more powerful. They would be able to propel the craft at such a high rate that a plasma-powered rocket (using technology available today) could get a craft to Mars in little over a month. Compare this feat to the nearly six months it would take a traditionally powered craft.   Is it Star Trek levels of engineering? Not quite. But it is definitely a step in the right direction. While we may not have futuristic drives yet, they could happen. With further development, who knows? Maybe impulse drives like those depicted in movies will one day be a reality. Edited and updated by Carolyn Collins Petersen.