Personal Responsibility and College Success

The freedom of choice, freedom of action, and the freedom to bear the results of those actions, I believe, are the three great freedoms that constitute personal responsibility. Recognizing the importance of accepting personal responsibility has a direct correlation with academic success. I foresee the development of strong time management skills as the greatest hurdle that I will have to overcome in order to become a master student. In this paper I will define personal responsibility, explain how it relates to college success, and provide a personal plan for practicing personal responsibility.

Every year more than 380,000 students fail out of college in the United States (Chickering, 2010). I believe the majority of these students drop out of school because they have not accepted the responsibilities of the choices they make. There are five key dimensions of personal and social responsibility. First, you must strive for excellence by developing a strong work ethic. One way to foster excellence is to create a strong connection between your own goals and what you are learning. Second, you must cultivate integrity by acting on a sense of honor. The key factor for developing and maintaining integrity throughout life is a sense of self in which ethical values are central. The third dimension involves recognizing your responsibility to the community. A lasting commitment to community develops when you find your own sense of purpose coupled with passion and desire to be a contributing member of community. The fourth aspect demands that you take seriously the perspectives of others. You must be open-minded and look at the situation from others’ points of view. Finally, you must develop your competence in ethical and moral reasoning beyond the purely cognitive reasoning. To do this you must engage in the complicated realities and learn to identify and respond to the ethical features of those realities (Colby & Sullivan, 2009). I believe by incorporating