My Failure In College Essay

A few times throughout my life I had told myself that I would complete a college degree by a certain age. First, by thirty and then the following decades. At each of these milestones, I had failed to keep my promise to myself. I will now look into why I failed to achieve this goal.

The first reason that I failed in obtaining my degree was that I did not formally set out the short, medium and long-range goals and steps that I would need to achieve each goal. I didn’t have a methodology that was going to allow me to measure my progress against each of these goals. While I might have sketched out a lifetime goal or big picture goal of having a degree, I did not follow up by having one-month, six-month or one-year goals. I only looked towards

Real estate lending was very tight post-housing crisis so I needed to ensure that I had a sufficient credit score to qualify. I reached out to a lender and found out what their minimum qualifications were and had each of my credit reports run. I did not meet the minimum credit standards at the time. Instead of allowing disappointment to overshadow my goal, I worked with a very supportive loan officer to see if there were quick items that I could take care of to raise my credit score. We found that there were some misreported items, a couple of very old collections and a tax lien which I did not know existed. More importantly, we learned that my habits of being a cash-only, non-credit consumer over the previous decade had eroded my credit score. My previous mortgages and paid off cars were no longer being reported. We put together a short-term strategy for some credit repair and established some new credit lines. I contacted the State of California and discovered the tax lien was from a start-up business that never had any revenue to tax and provided supporting documentation to clear the lien. Finally, we diligently followed up with each credit bureau for several months to ensure that corrections and updates were being reported correctly. After about only 90 days I had the credit score required to pre-qualify for a