My faith diminished. CalTech Ethical Dilemma essay

Essay Prompt: Members of the Caltech community live, learn, and work within an Honor System with one simple guideline; 'No member shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.' While seemingly simple, questions of ethics, honesty and integrity are sometimes puzzling. Share a difficult situation that has challenged you. What was your response, and how did you arrive at a solution? (200 word max)

Leaving Buddism

Essay: I have been a Buddhist for almost all of my life. I could barely talk when my parents began educating me in Buddhist principles and beliefs. For a while, I was incredibly devout- I did everything exactly as prescribed; I said my prayers every night; I read and re-read Buddhist literature. But over time, my faith diminished, and this happened for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I always prided myself in being an objective individual. When trying to reconcile my faith with my scientific principles, I realized that I was trying to fit facts to conclusions and not the other way round, which poisoned my thought-processes.

I also saw the damage that blind faith could cause. People have been killing each other for hundreds of years over religion and the recent events in the Rakhine state of Myanmar showed me that Buddhism wasn't immune to this. This led to me coming out as an agnostic to my family when I turned 18. Leaving my religion wasn't an easy task and I felt like I had lost an integral part of my being but fortunately my family was supportive of my decision.

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Please feel free to correct any grammatical errors as well.

Nadun, your response is more suited towards prompts 1, 3, and 4. Any of those prompts can benefit from this response on an expanded scale. So do not delete this essay from your documents. Keep it for the time when you can actually use it. You just can't use it for this particular prompt.

The main problem that exists with your response is that it does not offer any relevant response to the following portion of the prompt: 'No member shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.'

If you review your response, there is no moment in the narration when you may be said to have taken advantage of something within the Buddhist community. While your ethics, honesty, and integrity are represented in the essay, it does not have the correct setting for it. The representation of this prompt has to come from an academic, not religious setting. That is because the prompt is asking you to consider the traits of ethics, honesty, and integrity as a part of your character traits as a student.

What would you do if say, you found out that a group of your dorm mates were planning to do something ill advised to a member of the student community. You know that the person involved would come to harm and possibly have more dire effects in place should these people succeed with their plan. What would you do? Would you tell the authorities? Would you just sit back and let it happen? How would you defend your integrity, ethics, and honesty in this scenario? Explain it.

The aforementioned paragraph is a mere example of the kind of scenario that would best represent a response to the prompt requirements. The only qualification for the response is that it calls your own integrity, honesty, and ethics into question when you know that a scenario where an unfair advantage on another student or person is bound to happen. How would you handle the situation? Think of a real life scenario where this happened to you and share it. The Buddhist story doesn't fit the description of the prompt expectations so you will have to change your response in total.