Jay is a weekly columnist as a Club 75 Blogger, where he documents his journey through the CPA Exam. He has been a member of Club 75 since April 2010.

Week 36:

Hello all. Boy, studying during the summer really stinks. Stinks is an understatement, I have some other choice words, but will keep it clean. Based on my first sentences, you can probably figure that studying hasn’t gone all that well. I only logged 18 hours this week, which is under my 20 hour per week target.

It’s just really tough to log those hours, when the library is on a summer schedule. It closes early during the week and on weekends it opens late and closes early. In addition, it seems like we’ve got something going on every weekend. This weekend for example, Sunday was Father’s Day, so in addition to church, we also had a barbeque at my in-laws house. On Saturday afternoon and into the evening, my wife had a jewelry party to attend, so I was on daddy duty. In addition to that, I had swimming lessons with my older daughter in the morning. It’s just tough and next weekend isn’t looking any better…..enough said.

This week, I went through Becker Chapter 2 and started working on Becker’s Chapter 3 (Corporate Taxation). I didn’t actually finish Chapter 2 yet, I still have more MCQ homework questions to finish, but didn’t feel like I have had the appropriate time to drill the specific rules on individual taxation.

To be clear, when I say I didn’t finish, I actually went through all the questions, but didn’t get all the questions correct. Rather than redoing the MCQ’s 2-3 times in a few days and memorizing the answers, I plan to drill the concepts at lunch during the week and will come back in the next week to retry the questions. This is a new strategy for me during this section, so will let you know how it works.

I am trying to be strict about not falling into my old bad habits of rushing through materials, even though I haven’t mastered the materials.

The plan for next week is to continue drilling Chapters 1 & 2 at lunch during the week and will also continue through Chapter 3 in the evenings. I don’t expect to be completely done with Chapter 3 by the end of the week, but do hope to get more than 20 hours logged.

Hope I don’t get derailed!
Jay. O