SchmoopY said:
jalbertochavez said:
[I work in accounting so let me just say this: DON'T DO IT!!! DON'T DO IT!!! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!.
If you want me to elaborate, I'll elaborate, but it just fricking* sucks.
*"fricking" was put in place by Warmoth as a euphemism over the word I really wanted to use.
do tell, I like the fact that it is easy for me, and it can pay good, but please elaborate, so i don't screw my self over in 5 years. (4 years of collage, and loans, for something i might not want to do.)
Yo Schmoopy, I checked your profile and it seems that you're pretty young & from your post that I'm quoting I'm assuming that you aren't in college yet so let me peep you to the game on Accounting, or at least my experience. I'll start with school. Unless you are planning on becoming an Auditor/CPA, college is *almost* worthless. I work in industry accounting which means I just do regular accounting, no auditing. For industry accounting you really only need the first few college accounting courses; financial accounting, managerial accounting, and cost accounting. While those first few courses are easy, industry accounting is just too broad of a subject to be captured in just 3 or 4 entry level courses. So even though you'll need those classes, they still won't prepare you for any kind of work. They'll only give you enough theory to understand the overall big picture of accounting. Those classes are easy. You'll make A's and feel all good about yourself, but the rest of school, at least in my and every other UH accounting major's experience, goes straight to Hell after that.
It wasn't until I got my first accounting job and looked back at my time in school & talked to my friends at other school that I realized most colleges design their courses strictly to produce Auditors/CPAs. So after those basic classes you get into what we called, "gate-keeper classes". These were classes that weeded out the kids who could make it and kids who wouldn't make it in auditing. Those courses in particular were Intermediate Accounting 1 & 2. Those classes are more detailed expansions of the first acct courses and the beginning of the auditing you'll start learning. The way my school worked was that you had to pass those courses before you could declare yourself an accounting major. Now I know I'm not a genius, but I was always a decent student and always invested enough time and energy into studying & placed a lot of importance on my classes, but let me tell you, as hard as I studied for my 1st Intermediate Accounting 1 exam, it was as if I was blind and the exam was written in Mandarin Chinese 'cause that's how far I was from understanding the shit. So after 2 semesters of sleepless nights I passed both Intermediate Accounting courses, some kids aren't so lucky.
From there, the remaining courses were AIS (Accounting Information Systems), Tax Accounting, Auditing, Internal Auditing, and Oil & Gas Accounting. AIS was interesting and probably the class I took the most from, but that's only 'cause our prof made sure we worked for our grades; 10 projects and 4 exams heavily peppered with trick questions. Tax Accounting was the best sleep I ever got. Tax was boring and difficult. In Tax Acct every exam was open-book but that's only because it had to be. There are so many rules, exemptions to rules, and exemptions to the exemptions that even the profs know that no human can remember the shite. Good luck with that one. Auditing was easy because I had a good prof. However, an Auditing course and actually working in the field are lightyears apart in difference. Same goes for Internal Auditing, but I'll talk about Auditing & being a CPA in a second. Oil & Gas Accounting was a killer. I failed the first exam, barely passed the second exam, and the only reason I passed the 3rd exam is because I had a friend who was connected and got me the 3rd exam answers.
Earlier I said that unless you are planning on becoming an Auditor/CPA college is *almost* worthless. But would you really want to do auditing or be a CPA? The real money is in Auditing (most kids fresh out of college with good GPAs can make between $40K-$55K a year depending who you work for. But just remember, if you want to make that $40K-$55K, you better have at least a 3.something GPA, being involved in student organizations, it's especially best if you're a leader in a student organization, and you better have an internship or 2 under your belt, most well-paying companies won't glance at your resume if they don't see an internship) and there is obscene amounts of money in being a CPA, but at what a price? In auditing you go around to public companies and look at other people's work and make sure that their work complies to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the Sarbanes Oxley Act, and any other major accounting guidelines. I've got friends who are in Auditing, some of them are in the Big 4, and those kids pretty much work from 8AM-8PM Mon-Sat. Sure they're making good cash, but what's the point of cash if you don't have time to live? Now, you can't be just a regular auditor forever. Your company will need you to be more valuable. There's only so far you can go as a regular auditor so the only way to move up is to become a CPA. Being a CPA takes forever and goes on forever. To become a CPA you will first need to take the CPA exam. To take the CPA exam you need 150 hours of college courses. A regular B.A. degree will only get you about 125 hours so you will have to go to graduate school, or take some equivalent courses, and just imagine how much those classes will cost. Once you get enough hours you can take the exam. When I graduated, the cost of taking the CPA exam was a little more than $1,000 per try, most people pass it on their 3rd or 4th try. So after you pass the exam you are a CPA, right? Wrong. After you take the exam and pass it you will have to work under an experienced CPA for a year before you can get your CPA license. The CPA license expires every other couple years and has a $300 renewal fee (or at least that was the cost of it when I was told about it.) So, you take the exam, pass it, work for a CPA for a year, get the license and you're done, right? Wrong. When you are a CPA you have to undergo CPE, Continuing Professional Education. CPE requires that CPAs go through 120 hours of continuing education spread out over every 3 years. CPAs don't work as many hours as regular auditors but they work on more difficult stuff. So when you're finally a CPA you'll still have to go to school just 'cause the subject is forever changing. Oh yeah, and if you're an auditor you don't sit in a cubicle. If you're an auditor you have to travel around your city, around your state, to other states, and to other countries depending on what your company does. I used to hear kids say that they love to travel and that they're jobs let them travel. Screw that. I know 1 kid who does accounting for Halliburton. He got to travel. Know where he's been doing accounting for the past 4 months? Iraq. He got a 5 digit bonus for accepting the transfer, but do you think he's happy over there? I know 1 girl who has postponed her wedding twice, once cause she had to travel and once cause her man had to go out of town. So are you really traveling if you're just in another office building in a different part of the world?
As I mentioned, I work in industry accounting. I do accounts payable for a Federal credit union. The major part of my job is paying my company's bills. I'm sure when most people who don't work an office job they imagine it to be boring, gray colored, manufactured plastic cubicles, and pretty much what they saw in "Office Space." It's only like that for about the first 2 months or so. Once your bosses see that you can read and handle some basic stuff, they'll bury you with work. Trust me you won't have time to be bored. I'm telling you man. I got a list of daily work I gotta do and then I got shit that my boss has for me to do aside from it. I've got a lot of stuff that's backed up. There's so much work piling up that I'm stackin' the shit like pancakes! Half the time I can't understand what my boss is talkin' about 'cause I'm so new to all of it which is why the stuff builds up.
I know I've gone on forever, but you need to hear this stuff if you're going to make the decision to go into accounting. If you really think you want to get into it, go find a small part time accounting job, do that for a while and ask yourself if you could really do that as a career. I know I've made accounting sound bad, but school isn't going to show you the real. Before you can know something you've got to really get into it. You gotta go balls out and really look at it, burn it until you can see the particles and really examine it.
Accounting isn't all that bad. Every accounting job has some good perks. My job has a few good ones. Since I work for a *Federal* credit union I get every Federal holiday off and paid, my job is 10 minutes away from my house, and best of all my hours are set and I only work from 8AM-5PM (althought some days end up requiring overtime). I also get paid for overtime. Alot of those Auditors are on salary and work 60 hours a week and only get paid 40. One good plus about Accounting is that most accounting jobs will give you good health benefits.
Well, that's my experience so far and that's what I've learned. Think about it, let it marinate, go find a part time accounting job, see if you like it, see if real world accounting comes easy to you, don't expect it to, but see if it does. I don't know if it helps but there it is. Accounting isn't as physically grueling or dangerous as construciton, but it's definitely difficult.
