So I wanted to be a CA. Big Dream. But was it really?
I was an okay kid. Got decent marks, sucked at sports- pretty much from class 3 onwards, I was a fat smart kid. Then class 10 Board Exams happened. They were alright, nothing, great nothing bad (88.6% for all those who are curious, but this was back in 2008 cut me some slack). My entire school gang decided to take up science. I mean it wasn’t as bad as changing schools after class 10, but it was just a different set of people from my batch who hadn’t sat in a class together.
I got heavy into math in class 11&12. All my friends were learning advanced math for their engineering entrance exam preparations and I was still stuck on CBSE. I planned on beating them at least at CBSE.
Class 12 Boards- This is the first high point of my life. 93% in Top 4 papers (SRCC closed that year at 95% and Sri Venkateswara I missed by 0.25%) Shaheed Bhagat Singh College it is. This became like a tuition centre extended class as the people I used to study with in my tuition classes for Accounts and Math, were all in the college with me. Made some new friends but there was something missing.
My Accounts tuition teacher had told me to pursue CA. He talked to my parents, and I don’t want this to sound like I was pushed into something I did not want to do. I was in it. I was in it to win it. After class 12 results, CA –CPT the first and only objective exam in the whole course I managed to clear in the first go.
The college was facing a lot of issues in 2010 and there were times when the whole college would be shut because of some politics in the college. I started going for my CA Intermediate classes alongwith the college in the first year itself.
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st year exams happened in May 2011 along with CA-IPCC first group. Cleared both. November 2011 cleared the second group. Decided to leave college, get my regular degree converted to a School of Open Learning course and start with my articleship.
I joined Price Waterhouse Coopers in April 2012 as an article trainee. Worked there for 3 years and as the time came to get back to the books for CA Final, I was ready-ready to start my life as a professional, maybe pursue an MBA abroad in a couple of years after I saved up enough money.
That life came crashing down the first time I failed. I told myself this is CA, you have to fail in this exam if you want to clear it. But I kept failing, kept falling, picking myself up, trying again only to fall back down. I had left my job after the first failed result as I thought staying at home and focusing on my studies would give me more time and energy to the books.
I gave the CA Final exam 6 times and did not even come close to clearing even once. After the fourth attempt I should’ve stopped, my heart was not in it anymore and I wasn’t studying as much as I should’ve.
This is what failing in CA taught me.
Your preparation will never be enough, but you still have to be prepared. To solve a complex problem, sometimes it is okay to take a step back, take time to think how to reach a solution, have a plan and then execute. And finally-shit happens sometimes you can’t control everything.
Giving up CA might have been the toughest thing I have done to date, but I had to get out of that vicious cycle of failing every 6 months. The best option for a higher education was pursuing a management course with a focus on finance.
I got in to NMIMS Bangalore for their PGDM program. The interview process and preparation were a great learning experience on how to structure a CV, what parts to highlight and how one can drive the conversation in an interview to bring out their best side. The key takeaway from this was having a positive spin on things even though they may not look great. My interview for NMIMS was in Mumbai, and on the way to the college, I was reading the paper and the Nirav Modi story had just broken. So the internal control failures of the bank and the role of auditors was the meat of my interview discussion.
Interviewers are looking at your skill set of course, but they also want a general awareness of an individual and his/her thought process should make sense.
Extremely excited to go back to a proper classroom where the professor is actually standing in front of you as opposed to a computer screen. Every MBA class is a melting pot of people from different backgrounds and from all across India, and I have had the pleasure of interacting and befriending some of the brightest minds out there.
Each person has a skill or a habit which makes them a success, and people are happy to share their ideas and brag about what they’re good at.
Summer Internship Placement season came around right after we got done with the first trimester. Finance roles were far and few, but the mock group discussion sessions and mock interview processes helped us to prepare for our interviewers and future employers.
The best advice I received from a senior was to maintain a notebook of just concepts- one concept should not take up more than a page or two, complete with formulas and definitions. Add at least 4 concepts a week, and by the end of 3 months you have 50 different concepts which are easy to consume and revise.
Lowe’s came to our campus in January. It was one of the very few companies offering a finance role.
My interview was situation based. They would paint a picture of a scenario and ask me as a manager what I would do. A couple of scenarios later, there were some techincal accounts based questions. The interview also moved around my background and hobbies. Fortunately, my interviewer’s husband was big into watches and we connected on this topic as I’m into watches too.
Finding common ground and building a conversation organically makes the interview feel less like one.
I spent 8 weeks in Lowe’s and worked on two different projects. The first one was on Weather Driven demand for Canada business. The Home improvement business is influenced by weather (summer seasons will see an increase in sale of paints whereas the winter months could see a higher demand for snow shovels). This report is provided by Planalytics, and was being reported in the United States Home Improvement (USHI) Monday Morning Reporting Package (MMP). The objective of my project was to replicate this process for the Canada business.
The first challenge I faced was the discrepancy in the data available. USHI uses a Total company based weather impact line which is not available for the Canada business. To have a workaround to this problem, we analysed all the weather driven demand which was given for the Canada business, and were able to identify which all products were facing impact of weather. Extrapolated the Planalytics report to have a higher coverage as a percentage of revenue and did a correlation analysis of the change in revenue to change in weather (temperature fluctuations) to validate our extrapolation.
My next project was of a Distribution forecasting template. 3 times a year forecasting and once plan for the whole year is done for the Facilities working on delivering merchandise from the vendors to Lowe’s stores. These Facilities (warehouses) form the backbone of the supply chain and constitute ~3% of revenue as an expense in the P&L. Different types of facilities, expenses, sources of estimates and types of calculations makes this line item a pain to forecast. This financial model was designed to be dynamic and an easy way to forecast these expenses.