Jay is a weekly columnist as a Club 75 Blogger, where he documents his journey through the CPA Exam. He has been a member of Club 75 since April 2010.

Week 20:

11 days to go until Financial Accounting and Reporting. Like Hattie, I will certainly not be celebrating Valentine’s Day tonight. Or maybe I will, with the security guard on the quiet floor of the library and the cleaning lady that comes around at about 11pm each night (awesome). I took my wife and daughter’s out to a “Valentine’s Day” lunch after mass on Sunday. It was certainly not your typical Valentine’s Day meal, but will have to do this year. As usual, I feel unprepared, but will continue to churn through Wiley MCQ’s for the next 11 days. Luckily we get President’s Day off next week, which is an additional full day to study.

I’ve moved on from the Becker MCQ’s to the Wiley book to change things up a bit. I’ve started doing 10-15 questions of a given section, then I’ll check and read through them and move onto the next 10-15 from the next section. The questions are often similar in nature, so after the first few, I end up getting the routine down to get them correct, but won’t get them correct a few days later. It may sound crazy, but I feel mixing the questions up works better for me.

Anyway, I’m not keeping scores, but have been marking my answer sheet with a red pen, so plan on going back to the wrong ones each day and reading and re-reading them to try and drill them into this thick skull of mine. I have a tough time remembering things (ie. the cost and par value method for treasury stock).

I nailed these about a week or two ago, but had some trouble on a few of them today. That’s scary, because I don’t find treasury stock difficult, but I feel like my brain is on overload with all these concepts. I’ve even started taking my fish oil and B vitamins again in the last few days (I’ll take any advantage I can get).

I logged about 25 hours this week, so less than I would have liked, because I had two after work events this week and didn’t get to do the library routine on either of those nights. I’m gunning for 30+ hours in this coming week, lunch hours included, no ifs, ands or buts about it. I’m actually going to block my Outlook calendar for an hour from 12 to 1pm during the next two weeks. This is “Do or Die” time, so hopefully I’ll have a better update on my MCQ performance next week. Good luck to everyone taking an exam in the next week.

-Jay O