Personal responsibility refers to the act of identifying or recognizing a problem and taking care of it, whether it belongs to oneself or to someone else. Some personal problems can be handled at an individual level while others require cooperation as well as agreement. Personal responsibility also infers correcting one’s own mistakes, monitoring and judging one’s actions and acquiring motivation. For a person to be personally responsible, he or she needs to reevaluate what they think and comparing their thoughts with what they have learnt or discovered.
Attaining Personal Responsibility
Personal responsibility calls for courage and confidence. It is effective that a person portrays self dignity and avoids pride so as to allow him or herself learn from his or her mistakes. Dignity can be characterized by humility and entails someone doing what is necessary regardless of whether they want it or not. For a college student to succeed in education, he or she requires to be personally responsible. Success in college calls for commitment in the areas of study (Colby et al, 2003).
Ways of Attaining Success
Time Management
This calls for dedication of free time to the weak areas and availing more time for the same. It also involves completing and handling in assignments on time and entails active group participation. It also involves looking for more activities in all the subject areas and consulting the instructor on difficult issues. For a college student to be successful, he or she needs to sacrifice his or her free time and dedicate it to the weak areas of his or her academics. This may be relatively hard, and it requires motivation to handle it. This involves convincing oneself that they can make it and doing all that it takes to achieve the desired goals.
Setting Goals
A responsible college student should also set high goals and get ready to do all that it takes to accomplish these goals. He or she should also learn to work with deadlines, set by the instructor or him or herself. This means that the student should avoid procrastination at all costs. The set goals should act as a driving force for the student to work hard without force but out of his or her own will.
One should also learn to react positively to negative people and events. Some events in life seem to be too difficult that some people feel like giving up. This should not be the case for a college student who is willing to succeed. He or she should pull him or herself together and continue with life as if usual. In some cases though, one learns valuable lessons from the incident which can be applied to improve given situations. Students should also take heart and avoid feeling downcast when negative comments about them may be made by other people. Instead, they should take it as a challenge and struggle to prove them wrong (Berkowitz, 1997).
Focus on Personal Responsibility
Developing a Preliminary Plan
For them to be successful, students need to develop a preliminary plan to enhance personal responsibility in their education. This involves emphasizing moral character and moral development in the institution. This ensures that the students do not get caught up in other irrelevant activities which could waste a lot of their time. They should also develop and adopt a holistic approach to the development of talents both within the institution and outside. The students should also make it their responsibility to obey the rules of the institution strictly and to the letter.
It is also vital that students learn to write down whatever they think or feel about themselves. This may be extremely difficult at times as only few people would want to put up with negative truths about themselves. Putting down these feelings and thoughts on paper, helps an individual get rid of hard feelings such as inadequacy or deprived of certain aspects. It also gives an individual the chance to reflect on the positive side of his or her personality. This helps a vast deal in picking up undesirable truths and learning how to cope with them or rather still defining appropriate ways of dealing with them. Some of these unpleasant aspects can be rectified and turned into desirable aspects or still brought out in a positive manner to reflect the uniqueness of the individual concerned. This will act as a motivation factor and will hence enable students to work hard and achieve their desired goals and objectives (Berkowitz, 1997).
Seeking Advice
Students should also learn to look for and listen to advice given by people, for example, instructors, parents and guardians. This helps in refraining them from activities such as drug abuse and sexual violence and harassment. This ensures that they do not get distracted from academics. Students should also engage in responsible sexual behaviors. This includes having one trusted sexual partner if necessary and using the necessary precautions. This includes use of safety measures to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases and preventing early and unwanted pregnancies. This also helps an immense extent in reducing incidences of abortion in colleges and other institutions (Alexander, 2009).
Students should also refrain from peer groups that distract away from their main agenda in school which is education. Some peer groups in college may be dangerous as they may not be willing to pursue their goals in education, and hence distract other students from learning. This could be through in sighting the students to go on strike due to minor issues, which could be solved and settled with the institution’s administration board. Other students go as far as burning down the school. This can be extremely dangerous as it may lead to death of students and other students in the institution.
There are also some groups of students who engage in irresponsible sexual and immoral behaviors, such as engaging in excessive drinking habits and commercial sex. Such students barely have any time for learning as most of their time gets spent in these activities. Most of them end up dropping out of school and having reckless lives due to lack of jobs and lack of accomplishment of desired goals.
Conclusion
Personal responsibility is an essential aspect in the lives of each and every person. Most importantly, personal responsibility is essential in the lives of college students who are working hard and experiencing a lot of challenges as they struggle to meet their desired goals and objectives. As a result, students should embrace respect, honesty and humility as the key factors of personal responsibility. Students should also work hard continuously without giving up and with an aim of achieving their desired goals and objectives.
References
Alexander, B. (2009). Personal Responsibility: Why It Matters. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Berkowitz, M. W. (1997). The complete moral person: Anatomy and formation. In Moral issues in psychology: Personalist contributions to selected problems, ed. J. M. Dubois, 11-41. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Colby, A., Ehrlich, T., Beaumont, E. and Stephens, J. (2003). Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.