Advisors assist students in decisions
by Beth Beach, Reporter

   What can people do to make the right decisions?
   A lot, Dennis Lee and Greg Shortes of the STARS program taught in The ABCs to Success Part II: Making the Right Decisions on South Campus recently.
   “You need strategies … whatever will get you there. You’ve got to do something,” Lee said.
   First, a person should decide what he needs to do to achieve his goals, Shortes said.
   “He’s got to have his end result in mind before he chooses his road,” he said.
   Almost everything is a choice, Shortes said, and each choice affects someone else.
   “Anything you have any power over is a choice,” he said.
   Lee said, “Even paying taxes or not is a choice between going to jail or paying taxes.”
   A person decides how he spends his time, so his values will be reflected in his choices, Shortes said. Values and decision-making style, he said, are the two things that affect a person’s decisions.
  “Your choices dictate what you want in life,” he said.
   As an example, Lee mentioned how often a person studies is a reflection of how a person prioritizes school in his values.
   “If it’s important to you, you’ll do it. If you say, ‘I still just don’t have the time,’ what do you do? Maybe it’s not the time for you to be in school,” he said.
   According to Shortes, one decision-making style to avoid is delaying or procrastinating.
   “Oh, I’ll procrastinate tomorrow is a good motto,” he said.
   Lee said it is important to consider the good and bad sides to any decision.
   “Go over the pros and cons,” he said.
  “There’s a lot of information you can gather just by sitting down and thinking about it,” Shortes said.
   Sometimes the road to success is not smooth, but that is okay as long as a person is working toward a goal more often than away from it, Shortes said.
   “It was hard for me to choose a major, and I probably changed it 100 times,” Lee said.
   The advisors told the audience to remember a person must make choices if he wants to control the direction of his life.
   “Once you’ve done all the things you’ve got to do, it’s time to make the choice. If you don’t make the decisions, somebody else will make them for you. You make your own decisions, but you have to live with the results,” Shortes said.