00: Parable of the Talents

The Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 tells the story of a master who gives five talents to one servant, two talents to the second servant, and one talent to the third servant. The first and second servant both use their talents, bringing home double their original amount, and their master praises them for their work. The third servant, however, buries his single talent into the ground for fear of losing it, and the master scolds him. Several lessons can be taken from this parable in Matthew. Firstly, we, as humans, all have talents and should use those talents to achieve success. Secondly, the achievements we have directly result from the effort we put into using our talents. While we all have talents, we have to put work into using them, else they are useless. Thirdly, we are all given different strengths and weaknesses, and it is our duty to accept our downfalls and use our strengths to succeed. Finally, we are all responsible for our actions and how we use our talents.

With regard to ethics in general, this parable urges humans to use their talents. However, we must use our talents in an ethical manner. For example, an engineer may be an extremely skilled computer scientist, but using his/her skill to illegally hack into other people's computers for personal information would be an immoral use of skill. Instead, the engineer could use his/her talent to help companies with cyber security to protect against hackers. Additionally, people should not be ashamed to use their talents to achieve success when working for "good." In fact, the parable urges its readers to focus on its talents and use hard work to create success.

The Parable of the Talents applies to my life and how I execute my talents in an academic and social setting. The first step to using your own talents for good requires knowing your strengths and weaknesses. I have recognized that I may not be the greatest technical engineer in the classroom, especially when it comes to design. However, I excel at people skills, building relationships, and organization. Because of my acknowledgement of my skills, I chose a career path that enables me to use my background in engineering, but focus on people and organization skills. I know that I would not be extremely helpful in product design, but would be good at understanding an already-built product and selling it to customers. Because of this, I will be working as a Product Marketing/Technical Sales Engineer for Texas Instruments after graduation. Although lab work and technology design is a popular career path for engineers, I have accepted my strengths and weaknesses by choosing a career which enables interaction with people in an engineering environment. With regard to my Senior Design project, I use my organizational skills to plan meetings, create schedules, and keep deadlines. While these seem like trivial tasks, collaborating with a large group of people requires (sometimes aggressive and insistent) focus on the main goal. As stated before, I know that my technical and computing skills are not the best in the room, so when I use them for group projects in the classroom, I always accept criticism and help because I know I always have room for improvement.