My mother and father raised me on the principle that determination and ambition are the principles of success. My mother grew up not knowing her parents. Her father had walked out when she was a child and her mother had passed her off onto her grandma. She struggled in school because her grandpa was always in the hospital for chronic illness. After he passed, she decided that she wanted to make something of herself and began working at a law firm as an assistant. Years later, she accepted the position of Director at a preschool owned by a nonprofit. She hired me as a teacher and instilled in me the value of always being willing to learn something new. She taught me that mistakes could be fixed and problems could always be solved. These values are ones I live to uphold and carry with me in my career. My father grew up working in the fields with his family to make enough money to survive. He lived in a small town in California, in a place where an olive factory was one of the most common places to work. My dad has always had a compassionate heart and so he began working as a volunteer fireman in his 20’s, fighting back the wildfires that are common there. When he met my mother, she encouraged him to learn a new skill. He had started working at a printing company, driving to different locations to fix their printers. He enjoyed working with machinery and began studying straight out of bookstore how-to books to learn programming. He climbed the ladder of IT without a degree, to become a senior lead for many prominent companies in the US. He is my greatest inspiration because he taught me that working and striving for something, no matter how impossible it seems, is indeed possible. It makes me emotional to think that I have reached a place I never though I would. I was homeschooled for most of my life and never did well in high school. I was sitting at work one day and really asked myself if that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I realized that I had dreams I wanted to achieve and that it meant I had to take a risk in order to reach them. My parents encouraged me once I told them that I had started going to school. We aren’t very well off and the recession ahead meant my parents would never be able to pay for my education. I looked into financial aid and was relieved to find that community college in my state was nearly fully-covered thanks to state programs. I knew if I could get even halfway to my degree I could figure out the rest. I decided that my passion was finance after a long few months at my old job learning how to create invoices. I liked working with data and using it to understand people’s stories. Financial data tells us a lot of how people live and I feel I’ve learned a lot of compassion as a result. I want to use my degree to help others. In my community, housing has always been difficult for families to afford. If I could somehow be a part of creating affordable housing to address this, I could die happy. I already know my family is proud of me, but achieving this goal would make me proud of myself.