Opportunism

There are many situations in life where an individual or group of people can exploit the circumstances and acquire an advantage.  However, often times these individuals are inhibited by guilt based off of moral principles or prefer to be model citizens.

 For example, last year I was the treasurer of the Illini chess club.  With that title I was given the privilege of handling the entire Illini chess club’s financial responsibilities including handling affairs regarding the club’s bank account.  Now the University provides a university bank account to registered student organizations; however, it is an extreme hassle to withdraw or deposit money into this bank account due to the annoying amount of paperwork.  Therefore, our organization elected to make a bank account outside the jurisdiction of the University.  With that external bank account we could easily make monetary transactions without all the hassle.  Now one might wonder why a chess club would require a bank account.  The bank account is essentially used to fund trips to tournaments.  The president of our organization would collect the entrée fees and tournament expenses from each participant and then I would store these funds into the bank account.  Then this bank account would be used to make purchases.  During winter break last year we attended a tournament at Princeton University known as the Pan American intercollegiate chess tournament and to accommodate our team I had to purchase plane tickets, make hotel reservations, and pay for the team entrée fees.   The initial fee that we collected from the tournament participants ended up being higher than the cost of the tournament accommodations; thus, I could have been easily opportunistic and simply pocketed the extra money and no one would have known as I had made the payments myself and had exclusive bank access.  However, I did not take this route and simply reimbursed my fellow teammates the extra money I had paid as I believed that the money was not rightfully mine and that it would be stealing if I simply took it all from the bank.

 There was also another situation involving my bank privileges in which I could have easily have been opportunistic regarding monetary gains.  Essentially, former University alumni wanted to donate 200 dollars to the chess club and he simply handed me a check.  I could have easily not told anyone about this incident and cashed the check for myself; however, I believed it would have been morally wrong as it would have been a form of stealing if I had simply cashed the check for myself and furthermore, I felt I had a responsibility to be honest with any donations given my leadership position in the organization.   

Finally, outside from the perspective of a leadership position in a registered student organization, I have declined being opportunistic in regards to credit.  I have a credit card that my parents cosigned on and since I am currently not working they are essentially paying for all of the bills.  I could be opportunistic and buy many unessential things that may make me happy, but would simply waste my parents’ money.  I definitely would never do this as I respect my parents and am grateful for their financial generosity.  Ultimately, all of these scenarios came down to the same conclusions in which I declined improperly using money that I felt did not belong to me as it was a form of stealing and also disrespectful.