Being in college provides students with a plethora of reasons to hate life. Whether it is not being able to get into a class, not being able to hook up with the person you want or not getting the grade you needed from a professor. We all have many reasons to drown ourselves in depression. In order to get beyond these miscues, I think it is important that students quit blaming failures on external forces and take personal responsibility.

We all run into this problem. We get an over-zealous professor who claims it is his or her duty to make our lives miserable. It seems these professors will do everything in their power to ensure an awful semester.

When we receive that lower than expected grade, our first instinct is to blame the professor. Taking a step back, we realize that it was the grade we earned and we have no one to blame but ourselves. Instead of making our lives miserable by blaming the world for our inadequacies (and in this case the professor), perhaps students should take the brunt of the blame on their own.It cracks me up when people spend all of their day angry. For these people, nothing can make them happy. People who express themselves this way usually end up having miserable lives. With these people, don’t you notice that nothing is ever their fault?

On campus, I have seen that students frequently do this with political issues. If students feel they could not get into the college of their choice, blame often falls on the lack of affirmative action programs, college preparatory courses, or bad textbooks in their local high school.

Politicians are thus held accountable. While it is true that for some people their mediocre high school education may to blame, but the reality is that there may have just been better candidates.

Another issue of interest is political apathy. A lot of people get upset with their elected officials, particularly students. We get upset that the people who represent us do not share the views of the majority of the population. I have an idea, if students actually voted, maybe we would be properly represented by our interests. If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about our politicians. Ask people in Florida what they think.

The most common of them all is people not being able to graduate. I have a friend who is in his seventh year of college. After seven years he was finally supposed to graduate last spring.

A couple weeks before he was supposed to walk, he let me know that his adviser “screwed him over.” So basically he was telling me that after seven years in college he was not able to figure out what classes he needed to take. Did he go see an adviser before year seven? This guy messed up. He was not screwed over by a professor, he just didn’t cut it.

What we really need to do is take more responsibility for our actions. If we are going to make it through college, or life for that matter, we need to be accountable for many of the failures we encounter.

Using those failures to our advantage, instead of trying to blame someone, will make us better people.