An Essay on Personal Responsibility

Personal Responsibility Essay
Name
GEN-200
Date
Instructor

Abstract

It is not just a rare thing that I have demonstrated personal responsibility by making good use of ethical values and choosing the best available choices to lead my life whenever the opportunity presented its self. Somebody has to be an excellent time manager and attend college classes, so it may as well be me. I am going to ensure success in earning a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Phoenix by keeping focused on the ability to provide a college education for my children and a higher standard of living for my family, especially for my wife.

My Personal Responsibility
My wife and children are my responsibility to ensure my own success for providing the essential things in life. My children obtaining a college degree after graduating from high school is financially my problem. Just by attending the University of Phoenix I receive money paid to me every month by the government that I do not need, therefore I can put it in an education fund for her college expenses. By attending college myself, I am learning the niche and avenues of financial freedom to pay for college to help my children. For the longest time I have struggled to provide more than the necessities for my wife. Tightening the strings on the money bag has diverted positive cash flow into the savings account, which might otherwise be spent needlessly elsewhere. There does not happen to be a day that is not spent searching job postings to either further my career or seek other avenues of hopping into a better paying job closer to home. Personal Responsibility and College Success
To be successful in earning a degree I have to be a better time manager and attend class. Time management has been my worst enemy because my attention gets diverted to other things easily and I often get sidetracked. By setting a regular routine for study time and time for other things, I will be able to have a tool for scheduling everything. Focusing my attention to the job at hand and not wavering from my schedule will make time for school, family, work, hobbies, and my dreaded schoolwork. Attending college classes to some may seem trivial but living 70 miles away, working a full-time job and attending my children’s school activities are hard to juggle. By collaborating with my employer, I have made it possible to attend class regularly and kick potential tardiness to the curb. I have had to coordinate with other family members to watch my children, pick them up from school or take them to after-school activities when I am unfortunate enough to have to do something else. Preliminary Plan to Practice Personal Responsibility in My Education
To reach my goal I have to surround myself with a supporting cast of people and just do the school-work that is assigned to the best of my antiquated ability. Resources of friends and family are limited because of the fact that I normally stay within my own realm and rarely venture out to do new things or meet new people. My quagmire family has stepped up to the plate to help me out whenever I need them so far. By attending the University of Phoenix, I am hoping to make new friends who seek to accomplish a common goal. Sometimes I do not believe that the school work I do is to the best of my ability, seeing how I have been out of school for quite some time. Consistently checking and rechecking my school-work or rereading these alien like writings called electronic textbooks have helped me understand assignments somewhat better. My definition of Personal Responsibility
Accepting higher standards, loyalty, honesty, doing right because it is the right thing to do, doing thing to the best of my ability and accepting the responsibility of my actions are what I believe personal responsibility means. “Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong” (ethics, 2012, p.1). I believe my actions are not the responsibility of others, so long as my peers and I live by higher standards, as I have already set forth. No one can be held accountable for someone else’s actions by doing right for the sake of doing right. Personal responsibility has an unequivocal foundation based off being loyal and honest, especially to thy self. Blaming others or a situation is essentially dodging responsibility for something that someone else could not accomplish. Someone putting forth the effort to accomplish something shows acceptance of responsibility on its own. Not lowering ones standards keeps most people out of compromising situations that would question their character. Like the author of our textbook says, “All it takes is thinking about the possibilities and making conscious choices” (Ellis, 2011, p. 61). Factors of Personal Responsibility
The two main factors in personal responsibility are self control and actions concerning college success. Self control has to be one of the top factors in determining college success, especially for people supporting themselves. Reading, sticking with a schedule, taking care of my children and going to work takes a large amount self control to accomplish. Keeping emotions in check and not offending anyone, especially when I am tired is really nerve wrecking. Actions have to be swift, to the schedule and often times run amuck due to unscheduled events. There are several schedules that have to considered for running a timetable to accomplish all the mini-goals, such as children’s’ schedule, work schedules, wife’s schedule etcetera…, to accomplish the ultimate goal of getting a college degree. Unscheduled events that happen are often time consuming, such as a sickness in the family or something as trivial as a flat tire but they all eat up more time than the Pac-Man video game ever thought about eating those little yellow dots when I was growing up as a child. My Education and Personal Responsibility
Related actions to practice personal responsibility in my education to become self-sufficient by strengthening my educational work ethics, improve my knowledge through learning and participating in class. Participating in class has been a top emphasis from the instructor and after my first class, I can see why. “One area where first-generation students were especially likely to encounter problems was through broad failures to understand faculty’s expectations about the basic features of student performance” (American Psychological Association, 2008, p. 439). I personally know that all the assigned homework correlates with everything else we are doing or will be doing and not fully participating will set me back severely. Getting schoolwork submitted on time in these accelerated classes when it is due will be a challenge to catch up if a scheduled class is missed. Being able to do things on my own will improve my knowledge of how things work so that I cannot only help myself but also help others as well so long as I make the time to learn it. By learning how to use a tool like River-point Writer better my thesis would not look as archaic as it did in rough draft on a Microsoft Word Document, maybe even intelligible at best. The Center for Writing Excellence is another tool that I definitely would love to know how to use to its fullest, especially if I am going to be writing many papers in this university. Conclusion
I will be successful in obtaining my bachelors degree from the University of Phoenix by keeping focused on my ultimate goals. After saving up all the money the government sends me from attending college every month, my children will be able to financially attend college. I will be able to get a better paying job to provide a better standard of living for my wife and ensure she is happy financially.

Reference

(American Psychological Association) Collier, P., & Morgan, D. (2008). “Is that paper really due today?”: differences in first-generation and traditional college students’ understandings of faculty expectations. Higher Education, 55(4), 425-446 doi: 10.1007/s10734-007-9065-5

(Ellis, 2011) Ellis, D (2011). In Becoming a Master Student (13th Ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning. Retrieved from University of Phoenix Online Textbook. https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/content/eBookLibrary2/content/eReader.aspx?assetMetaId=0fd3a77e-dc85-4ea2-8bad-209df22a356f&assetDataId=0ae2f58e-34fd-439c-bc3b-8e6506aa8276&assetpdfdataid=bd0e00ef-1e9e-4548-abee-0bf2850c00b5

(Ethics, 2012) Ethics. (2012). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/194023/ethics