NINJA Monthly member Candace writes in. Hey Jeff, hope you're doing well. I started my FAR journey using NINJA, and I absolutely love it so far. I have just one quick question. I did not get the greatest foundation of accounting in college, and I know that the CPA requires a strong understanding of accounting. What is your best advice for me to bridge that gap, and grasp and build a stronger foundation to successfully pass the CPA exam?

If you feel like you don't have a strong accounting foundation, that's okay, because the average age of a CPA candidate is 29. Now think back. When do most people graduate with their under-grad in accounting? 22-23? Okay, so that's like five or six years.

Is that right? Yeah, five or six years. Let's say that you didn't work in general ledger or accounting for five or six years. You might have forgotten a lot of it. And, let's say that you went off and did taxes only. Well, if you only focus on taxes, then you get kinda rusty on just the general accounting stuff; journal entries and all that. So, if you feel like that you didn't get the greatest accounting foundation, that's okay.

That's where your CPA review course comes in. Now, there's plenty of great CPA review courses out there, a lot of great videos, so hopefully, your instructor videos helped walk you through that. But since you're a NINJA, you got the NINJA book. And the NINJA book, it covers all of the concepts, without throwing a phone book at you, and so we covered 500 pages that take other companies like a thousand pages in this because they throw all the FASBYs and everything else that you don't care about in there.

So, in your case, foundationally, read the NINJA book, and you might have to go through it a little bit more slowly, but reading the NINJA book, taking notes in the NINJA MCQ, and listening to the NINJA audio non-stop, you will be just fine.