PS Topic- Work for morally ambiguous oil company Forum

[Anonymous User]

I work for an oil company in Asia that sometimes makes decisions that are morally grey, never illegal, but the company definitely bends the rules because of its size and reputation.

Basically it is through my experience there that has compelled me to go to law school. I want my PS topic to center around how I see businesses trying to balance doing what is responsible and their responsibility to their shareholders, with the latter almost always winning, yet it is often the attorneys who step in and prevent bad decisions from happening. I have a few anecdotes in which I thought a decision being made was not a "right" one in the moral sense and I was able to prevent it from happening from citing contracts that the company signed, albeit these were not large decisions, but they were accomplishments for a second year analyst.

The PS will be less about this big bad oil company but more about how my experience there has taught me what drives business decisions and that I want to become an attorney to make sure those are the "right" decisions.

I guess I should also mention I'm one out of 3 foreigners, and the only female out of the 3, working at this company. I will probably mention some of the difficulties in working in a different culture but I don't want it to be the main topic.

Thoughts?? I'm afraid of sounding like I'm a know-it-all when it comes to business which it might come off as.

Edit: it just occurred to me that this could be a boring topic. Is it boring?

[devilblue]

This is not a boring topic. I don't know whether it is a good personal statement topic or not, I have just no clue, but it certainly isn't boring.

[HenryHankPalmer]

Boring? No. I think they got an entire story arc out of this premise on Suits.

[#gobroncos]

I think this could be a great PS topic. It's all in the execution, of course, but it definitely has the potential to be an excellent personal statement.

[rideagain]

Weird coincidence, I also work for a company that is morally, uhh, gray. I'm writing about my own struggles with what I think is right, what the company wants, what our customers want, what is legal/moral, and how I deal with the conflicting demands.

So at least one other person out there is writing about a similar topic, if it makes you feel better.

[Platopus]

.

[Anonymous User]

I'm not a huge fan, because 1) pretty much every company does some morally shady shit, and 2) a topic like this runs the risk of coming across as self-righteous.

You're definitely right about the risk of sound self-righteous and that's something that I definitely want to avoid. It's tough because I want to sound informed but at the same time also aware that I am still quite inexperienced. To your first point, yes, every company does do shady shit but I don't think it detracts from my experience? Are you saying that it might show a bit of naivety on my end to think my company is different from any other?


Thanks guys for your feedback! I'm gonna write up a draft and see if this is a topic I should go with or if I should think of something else.

[Platopus]

.