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My to do list & career aspirations

March 4th, 2009 at 03:50 am

1) Study for my legal midterm on Thursday
2) Pre-format my reports & prep everything to help make next week easy on Christine
3) Pack for 4 kids, clean the house (I hate coming home to a messy house)
4) Well, 4, thankfully DH is doing laundry Friday/Saturday
5) 13 Management letters (working in a team of 4 to put together an audit engagement)
6) Finish my fraud research paper (14 pages left to go)
7) Finish my legal research paper (15-20 pages left to go)
8) Finish my auditing midterm (take home, 10 questions one page each)
9) My controllership master budget & reading Chapter 8 and any associated material

I swear, if I accomplish all this by March 17 - I'll be relieved.

And I thought this was supposed to be my SPRING BREAK!?!?!

I also have to talk to a local CPA here, more or less as a favor towards my prof. I submitted my resume in January as part of an extra credit & had told him that one day I hope to have my own practice/firm and that currently I don't necessarily work in accounting - so the experience requirement for the CPA exam is HUGE for me. I love my job but if I wanted to be an attorney (for example) but I enjoy working at, oh I don't know, Target... as much as I may love my current job, if I really want to go for my dream - there will come a point at which the two paths diverge.

Anyhow, so my prof thinks this CPA could be a good mentor for me. And if we end up staying here for another 8 years or so, I don't know... there are possibilities.

My biggest sticking point is... to be perfectly honest... I'm afraid. Not afraid of a pay cut I'd have to take... monetarily I'd actually be getting a raise but not enough to cover childcare since I'm estimating it'll cost me about $2000/mo for childcare for 4 kids. I might be better off hiring a nanny. And I know that in a few years, the salary growth for a CPA is MUCH greater than at my current position. At my current job it'll likely be a year or more before I can get a raise.

But what I'm afraid about is... I love my job, so when I graduate and get my CPA license... what if I leave and hate it? I read about other people hating their job and junk like that. Thats not me, I can't imagine what its like to wake up and hate what you do.

In fact, I hope that is NEVER me. I don't have the where-with-all, to stay in a job I don't like and feel under-appreciated.

I have two work ethics:

1) I love my job and am always thinking of new ways to do it, apply new things that I'm learning, and challenge myself. I'll think about my job even when I'm not working.

2) I hate my job and I blow it off, I don't take it seriously. Its like night and day.

My grades sort of demonstrate that. Freshman year I didn't feel the whole pre-med vibe so I only went to half of my classes, I got an A in the classes I went to - but suffice it to say I ended up with a 2.0 GPA that year thanks to my F's.

Then I found my passion, actually found a way to LIKE calculus. Blew through my A.S. and B.S. in 2 1/2 years and for the most part it felt effortless.

Grad school now, eh, its okay. But I definitely don't hate it, I love it more so cause I like learning new things. I like my profs, my classmates, getting to talk to people that I don't live with.

But I'm nervous that if I leave my job, I'll join that rat race again. Maybe have an overbearing boss who can't accept my desire for independence and freedom to form my own ideas. Or that TIME thing. I hate tracking my time and when I worked for a firm I remember how billable hours was such a huge thing.

I don't know. That and the stress. Working from home has been wonderful.

Yet at the same time I wonder, how many years will I stay with my current job waiting/hoping that it can count towards my CPA license & refusing to leave because I love the work/life balance and the people. Meanwhile letting my education become obsolete the longer I don't use it. Accounting is always changing, in 2-3 years my degree from 2004 quickly became obsolete with all these new provisions and they are going to be redoing a lot of the standards. I'm sure fraud and whats going on with the economy doesn't help either.

I don't know... but I'm glad this is not a decision I have to make now or even in a few months. But its like knowing you want to get married one day and the guy you're with says he never wants to get married. You can hold out hope one day something will change, but at the same time you know your paths will likely diverge. That's actually something the CFO has been telling me for years, but at the same time I'm glad the company will have me in the meantime. I still strongly believe that I can be of benefit to them & this job is a great one too.

I'm just afraid of one day leaving it to pursue my dream and discovering I may love what I do, but hate it at the same time cause its going back to the rat race of Corporate America. Where people are chasing after titles and a heirarchy only to gain more stress attached to their padded paycheck.

So I wonder somedays, is it worth it?

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