 So I'll go up and just like say, busy that, and then I'll click and change it to the wedges. NCSSM has been continually committed to transforming today's students into tomorrow's leaders. Ethics and leadership is a trimester long course that allows students to explore issues in either environmental or medical ethics. By examining a wide variety of topics and decision-making methods, students cultivate valuable leadership skills and gain an understanding of the importance of ethical behavior and its role in our society. Everybody knows right from wrong the golden rule, but to be honest, the ethics and leadership class here breaks that down. How should you analyze a situation individually to know what choice to choose? Is there a particular method for doing that that always leads to the right question? And through scenarios and classes and books, we learn how to do that in the ethics class. We learn how to do it rather than just relying on a gut feeling. Environmental ethics students study ethical behavior and its relation to leadership in solving issues such as population growth, managing resources, pollution, third world development and environmental justice. In medical ethics, students explore issues ranging from cloning and genetic engineering to research on humans in euthanasia. Some days we have lectures by Dr. Warshaw. Some days guest lectures come in from various fields that we're studying. While other days we break off into seminar groups and discuss the issue of the day. Everyone is divided up into probably about six or seven groups of about five or six. And we're all just debating on the topic and answering specific questions about it. And each week there's different leaders, so everyone gets to exercise their leadership skills. Generally we would reach a consensus. Occasionally we wouldn't, but the whole point was to expand our understanding of the situation. There wasn't a right or wrong decision. We just had to debate what we personally thought was ethical. It changed my mind pretty much every class period. I mean it'll be almost as radical as talking about a subject, as having an opinion on it. Someone raises a point and my mind changes almost instantly just based upon, you know, the fact that they brought out a really good point that I haven't thought about. In this hands-on discussion-based class, students use negotiating and debate skills. They discover their own strengths and abilities while learning to effectively communicate. The biggest issue we've covered this trimester is working with the global climate crisis. And what we've done is we've merged with three other classes and everyone's been assigned to either a different country or a stakeholder group. We're trying to see if we can come up with a negotiation. We're trying to see if we can come up with the best decision and the best actions for our country and the world to take with the crisis. By examining different leadership paradigms and stakeholder values, students look at different perspectives, expanding their understanding of issues and themselves. I think our generation has almost kind of reached a tipping point in the world. I mean currently we have the economic crisis going on. We're going to have to figure out how to resolve that and it will be up to us ultimately. Also a lot of medical dilemmas. As medicine advances, we're going to be facing things we've never seen before. Decades ago we were thinking that Earth is, you know, just as utopia that has everything that we ever need. But, you know, we're finally coming to the reality that there is a limited amount of things on Earth. So we can't just, you know, be wasteful as we were. We have to learn how to serve. I mean it's just one of those things that not everyone is going to buy into. I want to be a doctor in the future and medical ethics actually taught me a lot about myself. It let me know that I am a much more emotional person than I thought I was. It's just taught me that even though I don't always agree with being able to put my emotions on the side, it's better in the long run to be more focused and rational in my decision making. Ethics and leadership stretches students to reach their full potential as leaders and decision makers, mastering skills that serve them now and far into the future. I'm the captain of the softball team here and so I've had to learn how to keep people positive and keep people motivated. It's kind of funny to be on the softball field and realize, wow, I just talked about this in class two days ago and people are going to want to listen to you because they're going to know that you've put the time and the effort into making the most moral and ethical decision as you can. And so the class is just really, it's really good just for everything. I would definitely recommend it for anybody because you've learned so much. When I'm discussing a topic with somebody I'm better able to look at the situation objectively and say this is why it's ethical, this is why we should do this and that has helped me a lot. It's improved my debate skills and my conversation skills tremendously. There's no more sitting in the back of the class. You want to be on the front row in this class and you want to get up in front of the class and show them what you think about each of these issues.