Accounting is a subject that strikes the fear of God in many people when they hear that word. Personally, I have always tried to stay away from accounting because it involves a certain level of meticulousness and number-crunching that I don’t believe I can get used to. It was only until I began studying accounting at the Lagos Business School that I began to get comfortable with the subject and truly understand the importance of it in everyday business management.
My relationship with mathematics did not start with accounting. I have always been strong at maths, especially during my primary school years in Nigeria. You see, mathematics is a subject that my parents took very seriously. When I was much younger, between the ages of 6 and 11, I would take extracurricular maths lessons with one of my school teachers, Mr. Koffi. Mr. Koffi was a gentle but stern man. If you were not paying attention in his class, just one glance from across the room would make you stop whatever foolishness it was you were doing. He didn’t need to whip his students as the other teachers did and I respected him for that.
It was Mr. Koffi’s passion for teaching mathematics that got me hooked. While many of my friends were out playing football after school, my brothers and I would sit in a dark room with him studying algebra. Sometimes I would get very jealous of my classmates, especially because I didn’t understand how greatly the information I was taking in would greatly affect my professional life in the future. All this learning definitely paid off, because when it came to the secondary school entrance exams, I performed among the best in the country.
Fast forward to secondary school and I was doing okay at mathematics. My teacher then would always get frustrated with me because I was a bit of a class clown. He would always say,
‘I always get frustrated when I see a student with a lot of potential that doesn’t take the class seriously’.
Even though the entire class would laugh, and I would too, those words would subconsciously ring on in my head even a decade after. I wasn’t that star student that I was back when I was still in primary school. When I look back on it, I wonder if it was because I was no longer taking Mr. Koffi’s classes.
Today I am taking a Corporate Financial Accounting class at the Lagos Business School. To be honest, this isn’t the straightforward maths that I had studied in school. It doesn’t involve the algebraic equations that I was once used to. It seems I have to learn a brand new subject that has a brand new set of rules. Even though it isn’t necessarily a difficult subject, I see myself taking a lot of notes and having to revise everything constantly. Let’s hope I can learn for my accounting skills to be appreciated as much as I was for my maths skills back in the day.
#EMBA27 Reflections about Corporate Financial Accounting