While this is not the first time I have blogged (I joined the club back in high school when blogging became cool on Xanga and MySpace), this is my first attempt in quite a while. My thought for the direction of this is to try to document my career path, which is still a work in progress.
First thing that should be known is that I currently work in the world of financial statement auditing. My intention as I was going through college was that I would be an general ledger accountant or a cost accountant in a company somewhere for the rest of my life. I had no desire to do taxes or auditing, both things that were pushed on me as I went through my classes.
As I took corporate and business tax class, I definitely knew I did not want to do that for the rest of my life. I had the hardest time staying awake as the professor, with his dry wit and bow tie, talked about standard deductions and Section 179 depreciation and how to best consolidate a corporate tax return.
I did an internship the summer before I graduated in the career path I was leaning toward. I worked at a small company in Ohio that had hired me as a community project. However, they were not busy enough to use me, and I ended up spending the summer freezing in a cubicle under the air conditioning vent and wishing for filing to do.
During that summer and the following semester, I went on the job hunt in earnest, looking around my college town for a job that was fairly close. I applied to all sorts of jobs, but the only one that offered me a position was a CPA firm in my hometown. I was getting nervous that I would graduate without a job, and so I accepted. However, this caused my boyfriend and I to have an unending long-distance relationship, as he was still in school.
By that point, I had decided that I had better get my CPA license, for if nothing else, it would give me a better salary than without it.
I graduated in December 2007 and started at the firm a few weeks later at the beginning of busy season. For about two days I wondered what I should be working on, and was sitting in a cube that wasn't my own.
Within a few days of starting I was put out on a small audit job of a nonprofit. I was incredibly nervous, and my supervisor wasn't able to stay with me. She went through a few audit areas for me to work on, and left me alone for the rest of the day. I spent the day wondering what I should do since I didn't have the documents she had told me I would need, and I didn't have the courage to go and ask the client if they had them available. Around 4:00 I told myself to face the music and asked for one of the documents I needed, which they happily provided. I started to enter the trial balance within the audit software, and the client came in and said that I needed to be out by 4:30. So, my first day on the audit side of the job, I took the trial balance with me and finished the work at home. Taking work home to complete has been a precedent for the next four and a half years.
