When I first started college a couple of months ago, I felt so overwhelmed by the new atmosphere. I took it all too seriously, trying to be responsible and all grown up. I have been preparing carefully and highly determined since then, labeling things and so on but it’s difficult for me to live in the moment. I’m always thinking about what’s ahead of me, where I’m going to be, and so on, if I’m going to find a career. The future is my dreamland where I am the best version of myself and now, to be the best version of myself, I have to plan my future carefully.
To begin with, I have chosen a major that I believe is going to fit my career goals. This particular major is business-focused and is a part of the Lee Business School. The major that I have chosen and officially committed would be accounting while attending UNLV, especially for the accounting department. Choosing to account as my major was not easy and took a lot of time and consideration because it was the realization that it was my future. Yet after looking at the classes, and determining what I will need to take for this course, it made it uncomplicated and effortless to commit.
Looking at the classes I have to take as an accounting student, the classes I’m most interested in will be ACC 201 and ACC 202 while COM 101 and ECON 102 seem to me to be less interesting. The reason I believe ACC 201 and 202 will be of great interest to me because I feel it will give me the required skills to find employment after graduation. And last but not least, I think that COM 101 and ECON 101 will be less interesting to me because I hate public speaking, and only learning about scarce resources is repetitious. Honestly, if it wasn’t for my academic advisor I wouldn’t have known about the classes I listed before. My advisor, Tiffany Schmier, guided me in many ways to prepare my future and gave me invaluable guidance that I would never forget to succeed in life. A piece of great advice she gave me was the need to be more connected to people in the field. She suggested how to meet with the UNLV Career Center to provide me with support and other methods to improve my university experience and status by improving my employability before I graduate.
I see myself working as an accountant for my future but, more importantly, as a CPA. I enjoy working with numbers, coming up with concrete ideas and the logical thinking that goes with it. Since accounting is the fundamentals of every company and organization it will help to launch different opportunities. A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) facilitates preparation of tax and financial statements for companies, organizations, or individuals. CPAs’ duties include the review of financial reports, the processing of tax forms and the supervision of audits.
Choosing the path to become a CPA aligns with my SWOT analysis because in many ways it allows me to pursue my goal of becoming a Certified Public Accountant. It gives me insights based on my strengths and weakness in personality, what obstacles I see ahead of me, and what opportunities now and in the future are present around me. Combining my personal SWOT enables me to develop as a major accountant by being open-minded, a perfectionist, overcoming my threats, and optimizing my response to opportunities.
According to Barry Melancon, the president and CEO of the American Institute of CPAs, “the number of changes facing the accounting profession will leave most practices radically altered in the near future.” And if all other businesses are going through big revisions, it’s best to presume that CPA firms will do the same. Over the next five years, Barry said that apart from demographic, workforce-related and cultural shifts that will reshape the profession, technologies such as cloud and blockchain technology will be heading toward digital reporting, and cyber-security concerns to likely have a significant effect – for both good and ill.
