While being responsible for our academic success, prioritizing work to achieve goals can be valuable to students without a success driven mindset. Responsibility and action along with ethics help set the path for proper results and set standards for academic achievement. As I explore this new endeavor in my life, I will outline my failures, successes and the lessons I have learned along the way. Failure is something I have to accept. I have failed a lot in the past, and I have allowed those failures to effect me in the present. As a young boy in grade school, I would always work hard to obtain good grades. After my first semester in high school, I assumed it was natural for me to get good grades, so I refrained from working hard. After a few months of not striving to my full potential, my academics began to suffer, and I failed a few classes. I was very disappointed in myself, and I then became afraid to try because of a failure mindset. I started to expect failure in my immediate life, especially in my academics. I started to believe I was not good enough to achieve. I would psychologically defeat myself before attempting to do well.
Now, I have realized the values in failing by allowing my disappointment to be my motivation for success. Since then, I have learned the importance of setting goals. “How can you expect to hit a target without aiming first” (Robusto, 2009).
Goal setting is important to me because I am a person who likes to take on too many responsibilities. I have a tendency to overload myself with work and at times get overwhelmed when I cannot complete all tasks in a timely manner. I became aware of the process I needed to work on in order to achieve my set goals. I started to write down all tasks I needed to complete and the dates of completion. I set time apart to evaluate my works and prepare to setup a procedure on how to fulfill these functions that allow me to feel accomplished and not overwhelmed on projects with sensitive time constrictions. While continuing with my academic success, I have been setting new goals academically and for my career. My educational goal will be to complete one assignment a day and participate in two-class discussions per day.
My career goal is to mentor one of my peers every six months in the area I have already mastered. In doing this, I will assist someone in their career goals as well as my own to ensure everyone develops and succeeds. As I read through my results for the Ethical Lens Inventory and realize, ethics is a set of principles of right conduct (Ethics 2011).
My core ethical lenses are sensibility and equality. I listen to my intuition to determine the characteristic traits and attributes that best serve the community. I remain attentive to the particular needs of those in a similar situation as I carefully evaluate their outcome for my resolution. Further sharpening my critical thinking skills in learning from others mistakes and not committing the same mistake twice. My blind ethical lens leads me to believe that I rely heavily on the attributes of the role. At times, this can be risky because I forget that individuals are fallible, and I should rely solely on people to solve problems. In knowing this about my moral background, I run the risk of believing that my role is more important than other individuals and will not be susceptible to constructive criticism.
So I do not hinder my development; I should allow others to assess the role and assure that all roles are important. Even though thinking is a process, and intelligence is the product (Jensen 2005), we have to understand without thinking of the ending result, we can never consider the product. Critical thinking has an important role in learning and development because if properly executed it allows me to see the entire situation instead of the individual task. I plan to take the necessary actions to determine the task with open eyes and an unbiased approach. Remembering the facts about the situation can help in resolving the issue. Understanding by reiterating the problem can help me further comprehend. Applying then analyzing the tasks and or situations so I can prepare the steps to come to the evaluation. I can see if the resources are accurate and thorough. The last thing I should be able to do to assure my critical thinking skills are complete is a form of creating.
I take all the information of this situation, and use it in my final resolution. These steps are crucial in the ability to think clearly and not be clouded by biased information. Advancing in my critical thinking skills is as important as my writing skills. I have to take the appropriate steps in continuing to engage the readers throughout the writing process. Writing is crucial as a student and everyday life because it is a form of communication. I will utilize the necessary resources to assist me in applying the lessons being instructed for completion of each assignment in accordance with the University guidelines. Allowing myself to create an outline for the topic before the rough draft is setting the priority of how the papers thesis will be well planned for the entire topic. I can use many of the University’s resources such as the thesis generator to begin the subject of the assignment. Grammarly is a great resource to assure the proper format and grammar for the paper.
The University has various resources such as live assistance in the Center for Writing Excellence. The benefit of using external resources is that one cannot rely only on their opinion alone but can get a different perspective of the situation. The University library is an excellent option for researching credible information to guarantee educational success. Although, some information in the library could be bias, we have to do the research on each source to review the comparisons and understand which source is indeed accurate.
In conclusion, the information obtained and lessons learned in this course have given me a boost of confidence in my critical thinking, reading and writing skills. I feel comfortable in continuing my academic success with this knowledge. I feel as though I have accomplished great things in these past five weeks and will continue to move forward. The University has given me the desire to continue the achievements in my educational career by showing me the proper approach of getting the job done correctly. I now realize that a failure does not define a person. The failures can be used as a stepping-stone in the journey to greatness.
References
Ethic. (2011).
In The American Heritage dictionary of the English language. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/content/entry/hmdictenglang/ethic/0 Jensen, Eric. “Critical Thinking Skills.” Teaching with the