Tori is a NINJA CPA Blogger.
Dear NINJAs,
It has been nearly six months since my last passed exam section, and I am seriously having withdrawals of the high you get from a 75 or better. I must say that it hasn’t been for lack of trying.
Since my last post there hasn’t been much change in my status as a CPA candidate, and I can honestly say that is very frustrating. So let’s rewind the clock to about 4 weeks ago, the last time I wrote a blog post.
As February was winding down, I was coming up on a couple of major stepping stones in life. 1) I was waiting for my FAR score, and 2) I was about to retake AUD, a section I lost credit for in November. Fast forward to the score release weekend in the beginning of March and sure enough, I received a less than 75 on both exam sections.
Since I was not home, I had the pleasure of breaking the news to my husband over the phone and/or text message. I chose the phone. While there were not tears shed during the phone call, there were tears as well as a whole other array of emotions over the next 48 hours.
Any candidate who fails a section or sections knows what I am talking about here. You go from shock, to disbelief, to disappointment, to “How will I ever get through this?”, to anger, frustration, more shock and disbelief and so on, until you realize, “What the heck am I thinking? I need to get back to studying! This isn’t over until I have 4 greater than 75s accomplished in the same 18 month window!!”
Now there are a lot more emotions I experienced during that score release weekend, including the feeling of a NASBA/AICPA conspiracy theory and/or that the whole thing is a lottery and each section costs me $250 and a bunch of time, so let me just lay out the investment for another ticket.
However in order to get past this hurdle in life, I keep coming back to the idea that no matter what my score is, I just didn’t perform to the standard set forth by the AICPA gods and what ever metric they use, is what I need to achieve before I get that coveted 75 or better.
So essentially that was score release weekend with of course a ton of residual emotions over the last several weeks. Moving on to the rest of March, I immediately laid out a well designed study plan and hit the books. That is until I started work on one of the larger clients at my firm.
Suddenly, (not unexpectedly, of course) I found myself spending entire evenings in the office. There were a few exceptions but I literally was at work everyday for 14 hours or more during every weekday in March. I quickly fell behind on my study plan and while I was pushing to retake FAR in the first 2 weeks of April, it became clear that this timeline was not going to work.
I kept plugging away though and continued to study every spare moment including some awesome marathon study sessions on the weekends.
March has also been the month I set aside time to take care of some personal medical stuff, like a root canal and of course the Dr. visit I have been putting off for all of busy season. However sometimes, things just can’t wait any longer.
So here I am, nearing the first weekend in April, barely on topic 4 of my FAR materials, with a ton of work ahead of me. I am making progress though and things are starting to have a more positive outlook. I have laid out a study plan for work and hopefully with the new strategy I will be able to get in more quality study time. I will tell you more about that plan next week.
Happy studying NINJAs. Don’t let sub 75 scores get you down. It is fair to have the emotions that come with a crappy score release, but the emotions you feel when you pass a section are what makes all the downs worth it. Don’t give up on the CPA exam, just keep pushing through, and eventually we will make it.
