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Ethics Explorer

A simple Node and SQLite app to help students explore ethical careers in engineering

Intro

Ethical conduct is an essential part of professionalism in engineering. Although engineering ethics is integrated into various courses at the Cooper Union, I feel that we can be more focused when thinking about ethics in terms of employment, and prepare students for the kinds of issues they will face as professionals. As a final project for ECE464: Databases and HUM99: Engineering Ethics at the Cooper Union, I am building a tool to help engineering students consider the ethical impacts of their chosen careers. With the caveat that every industry will have its challenges, my goal is to kickstart a discussion about the ethical impacts of engineering amongst students in the areas of equity, labor, corporate citizenship, privacy, the environment, and safety.

The project is build with a JavaScript frontend, Node.JS backend, and SQLite database.

Using the tool

You can use the tool in your browser at https://ethics-explorer.glitch.me/.

Caveats

  • You should choose a job considering many factors, including your skills, your interests, location, compensation, opportunities for growth, team structure and makeup, and job responsibilities. This tool will not recommend a certain path - that is up to you.
  • This tool should not be used to cast negative judgment on people. We all make choices based on the information we have at the time and for a variety of reasons.
  • You should not be discouraged about ethical challenges you may face - no field is perfect. Instead, I hope you will consider ways you can be the change you wish to see.
  • The industries here are fairly broad and there are a lot of grey areas, and not every potential job is covered. There are also potentially ethical jobs in industries you wouldn't otherwise consider.

Client Website Walkthrough

Most of the logic is handled in the script tag of the index.html file.

  1. Students start by selecting a major from the dropdown. This fetches the relevant industries from the database using routes.dropdown and displays the starting salary for the major.
  2. Select an industry from the dropdown. This fetches the relevant ethical areas from the database using routes.dropdown2.
  3. After selecting an area of interest, the explanation text and statistics about the industry are queried from the database and displayed to the user.

Data Sources

Industries in the database were identified with industries from the BLS’s statistics. For example, for race and gender, the data is from this table from 2020. When more than one BLS industry is selected, a percentage spanning the BLS industries is calculated. Although it may have been more accurate to select from the entire list of industries, I feel that the number would have been overwhelming to students and wanted to pare it down.

Data for the military was obtained from this Congressional Research Service report. It was assumed the military has no union members.

I determined the matches between majors and industries, wrote the blurbs, and selected relevant articles.

Suggestions

This tool is hack-y rather than robust, and has a lot of room to grow. I welcome your pull requests and issues, or you can reach me by email at jakob [at] cooper.edu.