My first Examination

If you diligently followed my ranting for the last couple of weeks, you must have stumbled upon an intensive high fever that I developed before the exam. Well, I am here to tell you that I have written the first exam and I didn’t die. Not only did the exam come and go, but I am also confident I passed it with flying colors.

For those of you that know about the AAA (Association of accounting avoiders), you should remember that I am the state chairman of that organization. Thanks to the patience of Dr. Owolabi and the group members at LBS, I can confidently brag that the corporate financial accounting (CFA) exam that I wrote as my first paper was the best exam I had written in my entire life. The only problem with the course was that it made me underplay the horror I faced the next day at Analyzing Business Problems (ABP). I will not even begin to talk about how that exam made me feel. Still traumatized that with all my numerous degrees and the knowledge I have harnessed over the years, I was embarrassingly humbled by it. I will save the details about the ABP exam for another blog post, and this particular post is centered around my first examination and the joys of understanding financial statements.

You may wonder how I managed to attain this miraculous feat considering my initial hate for anything accounting.  As the cliché says, practice will beat talent every single time. Although I had to combine LBS with my job and business over the last three months, I worked out a detailed strategy to tackle the exams. As soon as the timetable was out, I devoted four long hours daily to practicing each topic of the CFA course. I used my morning 2 hr sessions to rewatch the zoom recordings on our e-learn platform and the evening 2 hrs to find as many questions as possible to solve using the concepts I learned earlier. At first, this seemed repetitive, as I soon ran out of questions to solve and had to search the web for alternatives. After my first week, I noticed I was eager to pull up balance sheets and financial information of any company I could find to try out my analytic skills. This paid off immensely in the exam.

The prince of business