My Academic Experience

SD-140 College Success
Nancy Czelusniak
December 2, 2013

College Success is for students of any age who want to create success in both their college career and in life. This course is like an instruction manual to improve the quality of outcomes and experiences. It teaches skills and techniques for creating a fulfilling life - academic, personal, and professional. The skills and techniques learned are goal setting, academic planning and research, and lessons from the reading material- Getting on Course to your Success, Accepting Personal Responsibility, Discovering Self-Motivation, Mastering Self-Management, Employing Interdependence, Gaining Self-Awareness, Adopting Lifelong Learning, and Developing Emotional Intelligence.

To begin, one of the most important things I learned was goal setting. Goals help you achieve your dreams and reach personal success. To set a truly motivating goal you need five qualities. An acronym to remember these qualities is D.A.P.P.S: Dated, Achievable, Personal, Positive, Specific. Goals help you stay positive, motivated, and set you on course to success. Our goals and dreams fuel our inner fire and give our life purpose and guide our choices. By setting goals it will help you have a clear outlook on your academic and life plans.

Getting on Course to your Success Success is staying on course to desired outcomes and experiences, creating wisdom, happiness and unconditional self-worth along the way. The main ingredient to success is wise choices. The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the daily choices we make. To start being a successful learner you need to know the Three
Principles of Deep and Lasting Learning. 1. Prior Learning- when you connect what you’re learning now to previously stored information. To improve your learning and build your prior knowledge go back to the foundation of what you know and build upon it. 2. Quality of Processing- how you study affects the quality of your learning. For mastering complex skills and information you’ll need to learn deep processing. This skill is what helps you take in, memorize, and use what you’ve learned. By doing so you maximize and strengthen your learning abilities. 3. Quantity of Processing- how often and how long you engage deep processing. The most effective approach to this is distributed practice. To create lasting learning you need to use varied deep processing strategies and do it frequently. The next tool to becoming a successful learner is the CORE learning system. CORE stands for Collect, Organize, Rehearse, and Evaluate. This system guides you to implement the learning principles from earlier. Learning isn’t a neat step-by-step process. You need to use all these steps in different order for optimal learning. By learning these techniques it helped me to better understand the importance of goals and how success connects to my learning and how all of it contributes to the quality of my life.

Accepting Personal Responsibility The essence of personal responsibility is responding wisely to life’s challenges and opportunities, rather than waiting for others to decide things for us. The key ingredient to responsibility is choice. People who keep doing what they’ve been doing even when it doesn’t work are Victims. People who create change in their beliefs and behaviors are Creators. Victims respond to choices by blaming, complaining, excusing, and repeating behavior. Creators respond by seeking solutions, taking action, and trying something new. The result is Victims seldom achieve their goals while Creators often achieve their goals. You have to accept the Creator role and think, “ I am responsible for creating my life as I want it.” Another step in accepting personal responsibility is mastering Creator Language. Self-talk is important because what you say determines your choices you make. There are three components to self-talk: Inner Critic, Inner