Catherine S. Cabrera

For much of my adult life, I have balanced two demanding responsibilities at once: building a full-time career and pursuing my education as a full-time student.

There have been semesters when I have gone directly from a full day of work to studying for an exam. There have been weekends devoted to assignments, evenings spent reading when I was already tired, and mornings when responsibilities did not disappear simply because the previous day had been difficult.

Through those experiences, I learned something that has fundamentally shaped the person I am becoming: motivation is helpful, but discipline is what carries you when motivation is gone.

Motivation is a feeling. Discipline is a decision.

I have learned to continue moving toward my goals even when the process is uncomfortable, inconvenient, or slower than I hoped. I have also learned that perseverance does not mean that everything goes according to plan. Sometimes, it simply means refusing to allow a difficult chapter to become the end of your story.

That mindset has carried me through both my professional and academic life.

I began working at a young age and eventually built a career in multifamily property management, progressing into leadership and taking responsibility for multimillion-dollar residential communities. I am grateful for the experience that career has given me, but some of the most meaningful growth in my life has come from realizing how much more there is for me to learn.

That realization is what made education so important to me.

I earned my Associate of Science in Business Administration in 2025 and am currently pursuing my Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in Finance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Lee Business School. I am currently 27 years old.

But somewhere along the way, education stopped feeling like something I was simply supposed to complete.

I fell in love with learning itself.

The more I learn, the more curious I become. Finance leads me to questions about economics. Real estate leads me to investments. Business leads me to psychology, leadership, technology, law, and human behavior. One subject creates questions about another, and I have realized that gaining knowledge is something I never want to stop pursuing.

There is something humbling about education. The more you know, the more you begin to understand how much you do not know.

That is why I believe being teachable is one of the most valuable qualities a person can have.

I want to learn from professors and textbooks, but I also want to learn from colleagues, mentors, leaders, family members, and people who have simply lived longer than I have. Experience produces a kind of wisdom that cannot always be found in a classroom, and I believe we lose valuable opportunities when we become too proud to listen.

I do not want success to ever make me believe that I have arrived at a point where there is nothing left for someone else to teach me.

My faith has also quietly guided me throughout this journey.

I believe God has been present through every stage of my life, including the stages I did not understand while I was experiencing them. My faith has helped me remain grounded and has reminded me that my life should ultimately be about something greater than recognition or personal achievement.

I respect that faith is deeply personal and that everyone finds purpose differently. For me, it has shaped the way I think about resilience, gratitude, responsibility, and what I want to contribute during my lifetime.

And that has led me to reconsider what success actually means.

There are many things I still hope to accomplish professionally and academically. I want to complete my Finance degree, continue developing my understanding of real estate from an investment perspective, pursue opportunities in asset management and acquisitions, and eventually earn a master’s degree.

But degrees, titles, and career accomplishments are milestones. I do not want them to be my legacy.

As time passes, the more I believe that a meaningful life is measured by what we put back into the world.

Knowledge is powerful, but I do not want to accumulate knowledge solely for myself. I want what I learn to eventually become useful to someone else.

That is one of the reasons I hope to teach at the collegiate level someday. The idea of being able to take decades of education, professional experience, successes, failures, and lessons and place them back into the hands of another generation is deeply meaningful to me.

Perhaps something I teach will help a student believe they are capable of more. Perhaps sharing a mistake I once made will prevent someone else from making it. Perhaps encouraging someone during a difficult semester will be enough to keep that person moving forward.

Those things may never appear on a résumé, but I believe they matter.

I am still a student. I am still building my career. I am still learning, changing, and discovering what I am capable of.

I do not have everything figured out, and I hope I never reach a point where I believe that I do.

What I do know is that discipline has taken me places motivation alone never could. Resilience has taught me to continue when the path was not perfect. Education has expanded what I believe is possible. Faith has given those pursuits a deeper sense of purpose.

And through all of it, my definition of success has become increasingly simple.

I want to learn as much as I can, accomplish what I am capable of accomplishing, remain humble enough to continue learning from others, and then give as much of that knowledge back as I can.

Ultimately, I do not want my legacy to be defined only by what I accomplished.

I want it to be defined by what I learned, what I overcame, what I contributed, and the people whose lives were made even slightly better because I was here.