Author: Victoria Nordquist

Well this is the end! In a little under two weeks I will be officially done with the Master of Accounting Program at the Fisher College of Business. As I look forward to graduation, I'm also looking back on what a year it's been. We had a weird year as the first half still had covid restrictions that eventually lifted come fall. In person events were hit or miss, class was done in masks, and overall there was a lot of just differences between our year and other years. I am glad that most of our classes were in person, but it was nice that a lot of times we had an option to go online.

If you've been following my blog posts, you know that last semester I made it a personal goal of mine to have completed all four CPA sections by 2022. With my successful passing of BEC on December 16th, that was the culmination of my CPA journey, and I was free after that. Man, it was a weird feeling. I no longer had to spend every waking moment studying; there was no test date to have anxiety over. I was free in a sense. The looming question was, what was I going to do with all this free time? My passing of the CPA also coincided with winter break, giving me double the free time.

As the second quarter has wrapped up, my CPA journey has as well. I started studying for the CPA in end of May/beginning of June of this year and I am so happy to say that I was able to finish them all before 2022. That was a goal of mine, to leave the CPA in 2021. I took REG, FAR, AUD, and finished with BEC. I recommend this order because REG is a healthy mix of both conceptual and mathematical questions, whereas FAR is mainly all math and AUD is all conceptual.

Every accounting majors know of the CPA exam. The daunting task of completing four less than fun exams within a set time period. It's something your work requires, and no one looks forward to it. For those of you who don't know much about the CPA exam, it stands for Certified Public Accountant and is a four part exam one must take in order to become a CPA. The CPA has four main sections, REG (Regulation), FAR (Financial Accounting and Reporting), AUD (Audit), and BEC (Business Environment and Concepts).

As the first quarter of the MAcc program came to an end, I was reflecting on my first quarter experience and what I wish I would have known at the beginning compared to what I know now. Graduate school is most definitely different from undergraduate, especially when you are attending a completely different institution. There are three key things I realized during my reflection of the first quarter that I think would be particularly useful to incoming MAcc students.       1.