I was told all through highschool I should become an accountant cause I was good at math. My image of an accountant was sitting in an office with little windows doing arithmetic all day, and that didn't inspire me at all. I learned to add and subtract in 1st grade and didn't really want to spend the next 60+ years doing that!
In college, I majored in a few different things – Education (big time flop), Management Info Systems (basically computer science and Bus Admin had a kid, and it was MIS), Marking/Management/Accounting triple-major, and then switched schools to a school that offers a Bus Admin degree, but you have to pick an “Area of Study” within it. I considered “Entrepreneurship”, but decided that “Accounting” would be useful if I ended up being an entrepreneur, but would also open more doors for working in someone else's business….whereas Entrepreneurship would pretty much just work as an Entrepreneur. So, despite my highschool aversion to the field, I picked Bus Admin: Accounting, thinking I could always just leave off the Accounting part if I didn't want to do accounting.
Then I took some accounting classes, and realized that accounting is much more than being a bean counter in our current day and age. I had considered doing something like law because I really liked critical thinking and problem solving but I didn't want to go to Law School and I didn't really like the idea of presenting in court all the time, fighting for things I didn't believe in as often as things I did believe it. Well…I discovered that accounting could provide the critical thinking and problem solving challenges that I craved, could make use of my lifelong love of Excel (seriously…earliest memories of playing in Excel were when my age was a single digit), and that it involved a lot more than addition and subtraction…and it could involve interacting with people on occasion as well. 😉
Now I'm a CPA and I think that accounting has been a great fit career-wise. My only concern is the lack of work-life balance that seems common once you get into the career, but I'm still optimistic that I can find a happy medium. I'm not sure what that will look like for me, but I'm hanging tight for the ride while I find it. 🙂 Given that I am in private accounting, I think my chances are much greater than for those who are in public!
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