University of Michigan Entrance Essay #3

University of Michigan Entrance Essay #3 Fall 2008     

      Being the manager at a local gun club I have faced many setbacks.  From things as small as having a worker make a simple mistake, to things as big as having multiple workers not show up.  While working at the club I have had to fire multiple employees for different reasons, and it is never an easy thing to do.  Every time an employee is fired for a reason, I am then responsible for replacing that employee.  Most of the conflicts and setbacks are dealt with pretty easily, but occasionally more difficult problems come along.

            At one point in time the club had to fire five employees after their actions.  The five employees decided to vandalize a car for fun while working.  The car had been left parked at the club for around a week by a regular shooter.  It started with just searching through the car and kicking it, but ended up with the car being almost completely destroyed.  When the owner of the car realized what happened, they informed me and the club’s board of trustees about the situation and we had to decide what to do.  The answer seemed very simple, fire all five kids and be done with it.  The issue was that two of the kids had not taken part in destroying the car, and claimed to have just been watching while the others did the damage.  The decision was left up to me to decide if the two kids watching should be fired for not stopping the others or reporting the incident to anyone.  In the end I ended up I ended up firing the two kids because they let it go on and were covering for the other employees a majority of the time.

            On another occasion I walked down into a trap house, where the laborers do a majority of their work, and a few of the workers were smoking marijuana.  This situation would have been easy to deal with if I knew for sure all the kids present were smoking, but there was one girl that claimed not to be.  Every employee that was taking part got fired that day for their activities, but dealing with the one girl was more of a challenge.  She ended up getting to keep her job because all of the employees that got fired justified her story.

            The affect of these situations on me was that I had to find new employees to replace to fired ones, and in one situation train them in a week.  Dealing with situations of this natural is not fun or easy for anybody.  Most of the kids working under me are high school students like me, and some of them friends.  Firing bad employees is part of the job though and has to be done occasionally.

            In the future if I was faced with a similar setback I would act similar to the way I did previously.  The kids did not do the right thing and were not doing their jobs or handling their responsibilities so I think firing them was the right choice.