Blog Post #7

I simply love the activity of gaining new insight on different topics and becoming familiar with my surroundings. Whether I am literally exploring an area I have never been to before, or learning about and developing new techniques to overcome obstacles in the world, nothing gets me more excited than the potential for discovery. This passion extends to all facets of my life, including developing personal relations, picking up random skills, increasing my marketability in the business world, and of course, pursuing my degree.

Because of this passion, I would say that I have a very non-traditional approach to social change. Most of the problems that exist today in society have very easy and very temporary fixes. For instance, in order to combat poverty in our community, we could simply raise the minimum wage. This is the approach that most people would take to combat this issue, and while it’s certainly a step in the right direction, that prices will soon go up, and the poor people will soon be in the same condition as they were in before the minimum wage was raised.

I am the kind of person that does research into the root cause of problems and tries to fix them from the bottom up. So in this particular case, I would compare the countries with the lowest poverty levels have in common the countries with the highest poverty levels, compare the people living above and below the poverty line, etc., until I come up with some strategies that I think will make a long term impact on the issue, and then test those strategies out on a small population of people. This approach takes a lot more time, a lot more planning, and probably more resources than the other approach, but also has a much higher chance of solving the issue in the long term.

It’s also hard to draw support for working on this second approach to social change. In the first approach, it’s very obvious what impact you are making on the problem, and you have a very clear view of the results. In my approach, the results take much longer to appear, so it often appears to outsiders like you aren’t doing anything at all.

This is happens a lot with my fraternity. In our case, our brotherhood has been all over the place for the entire year; one day everybody loves each other, and the next day everybody is at each other’s throats. We are also having a problem with people’s level of commitment to the fraternity. Many people are not doing their jobs and aren’t showing up to anything. Now most of the guys in the fraternity think the way to solve this problem is to have a retreat or do more fun events together, but this will only solve the problems for about a week before everything goes back to normal. What I have been trying to do is isolate the root cause of each one of these issues and attack it at the source. It has taken quite a while, and we probably won’t see the results of everything I’ve done until sometime next semester. This makes everybody think that I’m not doing anything at all, and that my methods aren’t effective. It makes it very difficult to keep everybody’s morale up and keep their confidence in me.