Personal Responsibility and College Success
Donique Tulloch
GEN200
November 4, 2013
TJ Tijjani

Personal Responsibility and College Success It is my personal belief that even though sometimes other people or a situation causes us misfortune and is to blame, we are inevitably accountable for own actions. This is so because we have free will and can make our own choices in life. What we sometimes fail to realize is that every choice has a consequence, whether good or bad and that choice leads us down a certain path. What that path holds for us will depend on the other choices we make. Personal responsibility for me, is accepting that we are to blame for our failures in life. It is holding ourselves accountable for our own choices. However, the legal definition is not much different from my own. Responsibility, a noun, is the state or fact of being accountable for something within one’s power. In order for anyone to achieve success in college, we must first accept personal responsibility for our grades and participation and also to find a balance between college, personal life and work if we are employed. We must make our choices carefully and weigh our options taking into consideration the importance of educational success. Extra Credit is sometimes offered to those who have absences or poor grades, it is our responsibility to seek this information. If we miss a class, a test or an assignment it is our responsibility to explain our absences to our instructor and catch up with assignments, classwork and try to come to an arrangement to either retake the test or take a makeup exam. We must do this if we desire to graduate college with more than mediocre grades because our transcripts are a reflection of how serious we are to the professionals who asses us for employment. We need to define simple short-term goals, identify our aspirations and reward ourselves when we achieve them. This form of self-motivation increases our chances of success in college because we are driven to reap the rewards. Learning habits to take control of our time is self-management, if we manage our time and focus our energy effectively, we complete more tasks and accomplish more goals while eliminating stress factors. This helps us to control impulses and manage our emotions in a healthy way, finish up commitments and adapt to varying circumstances especially while in college. We must learn good work ethics, become trustworthy and more productive if we are to become successful. Once we have recognized how our emotions affect our behavior, we can better notice our strengths and weaknesses and improve our destructive behavior traits delaying us from success. Taking these necessary steps to thinking and acting positive will lead to positive changes in our college and personal life. Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, understand and manage the emotions of oneself and others (Segal Ph.D, 2001-2011). It helps us to build long lasting connections with individuals so we can easier succeed in all aspects of life and achieve our goals. This teaches us how to maintain meaningful relationships, communicate effectively, inspire and influence others, work well in a team and manage conflict. It is our emotional intelligence that helps us manage stress and emotions when facing difficult times, exams or tasks. Critical thinking helps enhance our analytical and problem solving skills in college and beyond, where we assess everything especially our own ideas. We use our intuition and inquisitiveness to observe through questioning and exploring possibilities. This builds confidence and intellectual integrity because we sought the truth through an honest means whether it is contrary to our beliefs or not. Creative thinking is using multiple processes to develop unique and useful ideas that we plan to embark upon; brainstorming, a technique used to generate new ideas. We can keep track by always keeping a notepad handy and asking ourselves new questions every day. “An inquiring mind is a creatively active one that enlarges its area of awareness.” According to "Critical & Creative Thinking Definitions" (2013) persistence, tenacity and understanding ourselves is key and this will lead to success in academia. We all have been taught that whatever we approach in life, we need to always have a plan in order to succeed at our goal. Having a plan for success throughout college will make achieving our long term goals easier. This plan can later be applied in our everyday life to accomplish other personal and professional long term and short term goals. The first thing we need to do as students is to set clearly defined positive short term academic goals in writing, this solidifies our thoughts and helps keep us on track. These goals should be personal and well-suited to our everyday life and should always be kept handy as a reminder of our ambitions. We must adjust our thinking in a responsible way and evaluate our choices and intentions, once we have set the standard we must now commit and our grades and choices will get better. Recognizing our learning needs is a step to improving how we retain information and we can better identify our strengths and weaknesses and know how to adjust our learning methods. These methods can be improved after we have assessed ourselves, done research and have tested different learning techniques, from there we can create a plan to successfully complete college and these assessments can be applied to our professional lives because we now know how our brains work. Also, we need to utilize university resources for academic and social support, this can usually be found in the Student Resource center, if the institution has one or our advisors can help. One thing that most students don’t understand is that these resources are here for our benefit and if we don’t ask questions, we will not get an answer. In conclusion, although sometimes other people or the situation we are in is to blame, we are accountable for own actions for two main reasons. First, every choice has a consequence and it was that initial choice that led us down our path and led to other choices and responsibilities came with it so by accepting complete responsibility for our educational and personal choices, we are taking control of our lives and the direction it goes in. Also, most importantly, we have free will and this is what makes us liable for our actions. It is our free will that lets us reject or give our community and situations the power to influence our decisions. As college students we may have many challenges and responsibilities that we face, but we must take back that control before we can become successful college graduates and employees.
References

Segal Ph.D, J. (2001-2011). Emotional Intelligence. Retrieved from http://www.darley.com/rokdownloads/insidedarley/sept11/raising_emotional_intelligence.pdf

Say, R. (n.d.). 12 Rules for Self-Management. Retrieved from http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/12-rules-for-self-management.html

Brown, A. (2009). Personal Responsibility: Why It Matters. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing. Retrieved from ProQuest

Hersh, R. H., & Schneider, C. G. (2005). Fostering Personal & Social Responsibility on College & University Campuses . : Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retreived from EBSCOHost

Critical & Creative Thinking Definitions. (2013). Retrieved from http://accreditation.ncsu.edu/critical-creative-thinking-definitions

Improving Your Creative Abilities. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.umich.edu/~elements/probsolv/strategy/creative.htm