“Well now they wont even consider anyone w/o 150 that hasnt passed or has progress on the exam.. so I cant really relate to the salary, but I came in at 52.5k in 2004, and I was making the same, if not more then people with cpa bc it was such a hot time in public. Go to school for 5 years, get 150 credit hours while most people can barely graduate in 4 years with the standard degree, lose 6 months of your life to the cpa exam, and then work in public accounting and get so burn out you have no idea what you are in for, and its all meaningless auditing, no one cares what you are doing, yet you are in an audit room till 10, 11, 12pm doing stuff that no one in their right mind gives two craps about. By the time you make senior, if you can make it that far, over 60% of your time will be spent doing admin work and misc projects to make your 18 bosses happy, and dont forget about serving the client non-stop, and dealing with your staff. I'm just saying, I feel bad that people have to go through all that school and studying and they forget it so fast because they have no idea what they are reading. So your school and cpa will not add any value to your job, especially because you will be making copies and getting lunch and dinner for your first year. Your second year, you will be doing inventory rollforward tests, looking at thousands of invoices to match dates and amounts, you wont have a clue what you are doing, what assertions you are working on, how it fits into the big picture, etc.”
Sounds like auditing isn't for you man..have you considered going into something else? A CPA doesn't mean public accounting, I'm going into consulting for hedge funds/investment banks/money managers, dealing straight up with executives and teaching everyone from I-banking analysts up to the execs themselves how to build financial models and implement them into my companies software…I wouldn't call that getting lunch or coffee for anyone.
Also, auditing (from what I hear) can be awesome too…if you worked at a Big 4 you may think differently, but you also have to realize a LOT of people love their jobs at Big 4. When you have such a huge entity with thousands and thousands of workers, there are going to be offices and divisions that are night and day different from others…I know people who loathe big 4 and people who love it, depends on who you are and where you work.
Personally, I went to school for 4 years, I didn't study accounting but picked up all the units my senior year (enough to take the exam) and finished in time to graduate, spent 3 months taking all 4 CPA tests right out of college before work, and feel like the exams have REALLY helped me grow. You might think it's a waste or all will be forgotten, but I'm 22 years old and feel comfortable helping anyone work out a business plan covering tax strategy, developing capital structure, legal requirements/issues, and much more because of these exams.
The CPA exams are a beast, and anyone going through them should be proud.
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