College is, by its nature, a time of increasing personal responsibility. For the first time, young adults are essentially set free to make of their lives what they will. The choices we all face in college affect us for the rest of our lives; be they good or bad. The key tool to success in college is to be responsible. It goes without saying that you can’t learn (and you can’t graduate) unless you choose to wake yourself up in the morning to go to class. Nor can you be successful if you choose to party too much instead of studying, or even staying up late for no reason the night before a test. The truth is that college mimics life in this aspect more than any other way. The problem is that too many people in today’s society have forgotten this fact. In today’s world more than in any other time we have become embedded with an overwhelming sense of entitlement. Too often we shrug off our responsibilities thinking that someone or something else will take care of them for us.
This issue is critically intertwined with everything in our lives, including the way we choose to shape our government and society in the future. We must ask ourselves whether we want a government that takes care of us from cradle to grave, or whether we want a government that stays out of our personal lives and allows us to make choices, good or bad, and be rewarded or punished by the consequences.
But in our own lives as college students, we cannot forget that times like these are when we set the tone for how we want our society to look as we enter into the world. It’s up to us to remember to be responsible adults (while still experiencing life and having a little fun) because the habits and lives that we begin to shape for ourselves today are the lives that we will live tomorrow.
Let’s make sure they’re lives to be proud of.