On this journey through college, I am currently an accounting major at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. My leaning community that is helping me navigate my first year of college is political science. At the very beginning of this year, I was over stressing about everything and thought I had to have every aspect of my life together. Now that I have somewhat of an experience as a college student, I stay organized and put everything in a planner. I understand that it I don’t have to have every aspect of my life together. So far college has been a wild experience and that every day brings something new. One thing I need to start focusing on and understanding more is lifelong learning. When I think of lifelong learning, I believe it is something that will help me carry out my education and use what have learned in future stages in my life. Lifelong learning has four major components persistence, curiosity, transfer, and personal responsibility.
Persistence is something that you are constantly there helping you achieve in goals you have in life. Being persistent is a need in lifelong learning, without it you can lose sight of what your goals were in the first place. This is one of the terms I personally struggle with the most in the steps of lifelong learning. I have so many goals in life that I want to achieve but I’m never persistent enough to achieve them. The reason this is because I get sidetrack in looking into the future and I don’t focus on the now. For awhile now I’ve wanted to write a book, but I was never persistent enough to start it. So, I just push that goal to the side and look at thing I can get done in a short time span. With college and seminar class I have a fire inside of me that now makes helps with being more determined to finish the goals I have already set.
Something that I’ve always had that is a part of lifelong learning is curiosity. I have been told all my life that curiosity kills the cat, but people forget the whole quote “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back” and this reminds me it ok to curious. Curiosity is when one wants to understand what is unknow to them and to seek more knowledge of it. Without curiosity in lifelong learning things get boring and people lose a desire to learn. This is one the strength I have in lifelong learning. I’m always curious about the unknow, that’s what makes learning so much fun in my opinion. In the learning community and the help of curiosity I have learned more about myself through the lessons so far in seminar. I have never really had the desire to understand my political beliefs until the seminar assignment over political ideology. Which sparked curiosity about myself and what I truly believe in.
The next term is transfer and that is something I really struggle with to put in to practice in the real world. Transfer is when you learn something, and you can apply that skill into the real world. I feel that for me transferring a skill I learned in the classroom and using it in the outside world is easier said than done. We are taught a skill in the classroom but never really taught how to use it outside of the classroom. One skill I did learn in the classroom that did transfer into the real world is communication. Without learning how to properly communicate with other in a classroom setting, you really don’t understand how to communicate in public. Which is something almost everyone has when it comes to lifelong learning.
The last important component in lifelong learning is personal responsibility. Without personal responsibility you can’t really go as far as you want to in life. Personal responsibility is when you hold yourself accountable for what you do or don’t do. For me this part of lifelong learning is an in between, it’s not really a weakness or a strength for me. But in college I have started to understand it more for example now I have to hold accountable for everything I do in college unlike when I was a child, I had parents to fall back on. Now if I don’t hold my self personally responsibly the only one to blame for my failure is myself. I think this is the most forgotten about term in lifelong learning because people like to look for other aspect to blame when failure happens and never hold themselves personally responsibly.
After all is said and done, without persistence, curiosity, transfer, and personal responsibility one can’t really have lifelong learning. Persistence is there to keep you on track for you goals in life. Curiosity holds the desires to keep learning about new thing in the world. Transfer is for helping put all the skills you have learned and put them out into the real world. Personally responsibility, makes you look at and understand what actions you take in life. With this in mind my two goals for the rest of the semester is to be more focus on my studies and explore more thing out of my comfort zone.
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