Chartered Accountant (CA) Designation Revealed!

Online Accounting Community for Students

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

5.5 More Months to go!

In a bit over 5 and a half month’s time, I will become a CA, should I choose to finish up the experience requirements in the next half year. This year has been an extremely busy packed season with so much things going on at the same time.

I apologize for not keeping this blog as active as I should have, but I’m back for good now, and will be blogging regularly (I promise), and will be even doing a bit of a website design in the future, and adding lots of great resources for fresh prospective CA students.

With 5 months left until I become a CA, these are the available interesting career options and choices available to me:

Do I still within Big 4 and wait until I make manager before leaving industry?

Do I venture off into industry once I get my CA?

Will I go private or public?

Do I even want to make CA so fast?

Do I want to try a small accounting firm?

Do I answer all the headhunter calls I’m getting?

Do I take a break for awhile and try some other things?

I must say the future holds some interesting promise. One of my regrets and maybe it’s a “The grass is greener on the other side” kind of thing, is that I’ve been working at Big 4 environment since I was 19 years old at a co-op and I never had a summer off since then.

It was either in school getting CA credits or co-oping at Big 4. I feel pretty tired and feel a lot of youth sacrifice had to be made. I felt a lot of envy over my other non accounting friends who got to jump from job to job and try different things. Recently I read about the guy who had 52 jobs in 52 weeks, www.oneweekjob.com and I felt really envious.

Looking back, I might have chosen a different route. Now that I’m nearing the end of my journey, I feel there is a lot of soul searching for me to do still. I feel lots of people at Big 4 are the same way. They don’t really know what they want to do with their lives and are putting off thinking about it until they get their CA.

The worse thing I would imagine is to get your CA, and then leave to a industry job that is even worse. After auditing at a lot of industry jobs, I notice that the CA’s especially in financial reporting roles are very miserable and have worse jobs than at Big 4 in terms of the *shit* they have to deal with.

Time to think has begun.

The Accountant.

4 comments:

  1. I find one of your points quite funny... why WOULDN'T you want to make CA "so fast"?

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  2. was it you who long time back posted on being an experience writer....well, whoever it was never wrote about their journey to become a successful experience writer

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  3. Hi. Can you give some examples of annoying matters industry accountants in financial reporting roles have to deal with? Thanks.

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  4. Lol, after reading this, I assume you are a Waterloo student. I'm a 2nd year Waterloo AFM student right now and I'm loving this blog.

    I am entering the Big 4 for my first co-op term starting in January, and I just had some questions about the work environment and industry as a whole. I'm wondering if there is any way I can contact you, The Accountant?

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