My Rough Start (A Tad Long)

Hi everyone,
This is my first post. I have been lurking here for a bit and thought it was high time to actually post something. It being nearly 2 a.m. and unable to sleep, now seems like a good time. Oh, and a nice bit of venting will soon commence in the hope that it gets all the frustration out and sleep can finally come!

So first, my background is a tad unorthodox. I did a fine job on my undergrad at a local school and graduated with my bachelors…in European History. Now, at that time, I thought teaching was the direction for me. After a few years, I figured out it certainly was NOT. I love to teach, but kids’ parents are annoying, admin is a joke, and the pay is absolutely insane. So, a career change was in order.

Looking around, I figured I would give business a shot. I landed a job as a secretary of all things. I did well at my job, though I’ll admit part of that is I’m very good at looking busy/intelligent/industrious while screwing around. After a couple of years, and a few promotions, I was the office manager of a nice little consulting firm in S.F. Now I had the problem of hitting a ceiling. In that position, there wasn’t much higher I could climb. Darn it all to heck and back, I was frustrated (I'm a tad ambitious)!

So, again looking around, I thought of how I was good at using my company’s accounting software and seemed to just ‘get’ numbers. Now why I ‘get’ numbers is beyond me, but I find myself counting random things in a meeting. If someone is throwing around numbers, I naturally start adding them, or doing something with them mentally. Also, not that I really understand it, but according to those funky tests you take in school for aptitude, I seemed to always score high with pattern recognition and pulling order out of seeming chaos. Whatever.

Now, knowing I had a knack for numbers and such, I thought accounting was the way to go. So I jumped right off that safe (and highly overpaid) bridge to take a big pay cut as a lowly bookkeeper. At the same time I was back in school taking a huge number of courses (working and going to school full time is NO joke) to prep for the CPA (did I mention that I’m ambitious?).

Fast forwarding a few years, I now have my CPA, an additional piece of paper as a CFE, and am manager of my company’s accounting department. Quite a jump in only a few years (stupid ambition). The problem is, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing half the time (remember my comment earlier about my skills at looking industrious?). The accounting is fine, though I could wish for more challenges. My weakness is the management stuff. I just don’t seem to get it. So, once again, I’m looking for a way to fix this and came up with the idea of an MBA. I really want to climb the ladder to CFO or something comparable some day. As I am now, with this skill set, that isn’t too likely (nor would I deserve it). I know there are holes in my knowledge, I admit them, and am very motivated to fix this.

I decided that only a little while ago. Like I do so much in life, I’ve jumped in with gusto ordering stuff and studying like crazy (while still working full time). The problem is, I forgot just about EVERYTHING in math that I used to know. Holy crap on a crutch! My last college math class was my freshman year, which was 13 years ago! I will admit that, after only a few days of studying, and finishing 2 of the Manhattan Quant books, that I feel better about some of the stuff. Still, great googlymoogly, some of this stuff is dense. I don’t know if my experience is the same as others. I can only hope, as sad as that is, that some of the members with big scores were in the same boat as me. I might just be self-delusional enough to convince myself of that, even if it wasn’t the case.

So….I take heart from some of the posts on here and hope I can someday say I got some crazy score. I look back on all this and think, how did I get here?

OK, venting done. I think I might finally get some sleep. If you actually read this, kudos to you, and why are you reading all of this anyway???