For my career life education assignment, I decided to talk to my indepth mentor, Mr. Wang.
The first piece of advice that he gave me was regarding education. Although taking accounting or investing classes in high school certainly is helpful, can easily be learned independently, meaning that if I have another career that I’m really interested in, I should focus my current academic courses on that. He backed up his claim with a personal story, in that he only picked up accounting after he came to Canada as a university student, and still managed to earn CPA, CGA, and ACCA. This knowledge significantly lessened my burden (for now), as now I have slightly more time to make my decision. I will still take marketing, accounting, and economics next year, but I will not have to make a decision about my career any time soon.
Next, we talked about some things that I should consider before deciding whether or not I should work in these two fields. First, for accounting, his general response was that several things I have to consider are how interested I am, how much I enjoy repetition, what I expect from a job, and how effectively I can think of innovative ways to solve problems. Two things that he reminded me to especially focus on were how interested I am, as there will be a lot of tedious obstacles that I have to overcome, and what I expect from this career, as accounting jobs tend to be quite different from other office jobs. Regarding investing, he commented that the only thing that I can really consider is whether I am willing to pay attention to market news 24/7. He also told me that although investing can be a good way to earn a bit of additional money, I should definitely not consider it as a main career. This is as a profit isn’t guaranteed, and the instability makes it less than desirable as the first choice for a potential career path. Hearing this, I started to become slightly doubtful, as I suddenly realized I couldn’t actually pinpoint what specifically about investing and accounting that I found interesting. Over the past week, I have given this a bit of thought, but I really don’t think I can make a decision before I learn more about the two topics.
Finally, I asked for some general advice, and my mentor actually advised me against considering accounting seriously. He gave several reasons for his advice, but the two that really stuck with me were that he couldn’t see me enjoying repetition and that he thinks I don’t really understand accounting yet. For his first point, he stated that repetition and memorization are both rudimentary to accounting, and although “[I] can do it, [I will probably] lose interest over time.” He then extended on this with his second reason, pointing out that I don’t really know what specifically about accounting that I enjoy, apart from just finding it easy. After careful consideration, I agree with both his points, but as I don’t have to worry about this too much in high school, I still have several years before having to make my decision.
Audio recording: link
