I had a chat with Jonathan, CPA Canada's Common Final Exam (CFE) 2019 candidate who earned a place at the Honour Roll. He was the top 1% of all writers at the CFE, he graduated from University with high honours and great distinction, and his honours thesis is being published at the American Accounting Association Journal. Needless to say, Jonathan is very talented and there is a lot you can learn from him. Listen to our interview and read the partial-transcript below. ☞ Need help with CFE? Learn more about Canada's newest CFE prep program:
PARTIAL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
1) Why don’t we start with your background, could you tell us a little about yourself?
I live in Melfort, Saskatchewan, I work at MNP, I'm a designated professional there, so I just got my letters a couple of weeks ago. I graduated from the University of Saskatchewan, with high honours and great distinction there, and I actually wrote honours thesis paper that's being published in the American Accounting Association Journal this February.
2) Why don't you tell us about your CFE prep schedule, for example, how many weeks did you take off and how many hours did you study?
I took 8-weeks off in total. I studied every day Monday to Friday from 8 to 5, I took a lunch in that time, I treated it like it was my full-time job during that time and then at 5 o'clock I stopped studying. I would just take the evening off and relax like I normally would if I was just working. I tried to maintain as much consistency as I could from working full-time to studying full-time for those 2 months.
3) Can you tell us how you debrief your cases?
Yeah, so I debrief a lot, I would say compared to some of my cohorts that were at the same firm, I would say I debriefed the most.
4) Once you went through this process and you got to CFE, was there anything that surprised you, when you actually got to Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, or was it like you expected?
I found it to be exactly what I expected it to be.
5) Do you use a computer outline or a paper outline?
I did not know what to do on the first day of Capstone 2. On Day 3, I didn't outline on the computer, because I didn't have enough time. But on Day 2, I really needed to outline, after 3 and 1/2 hours, it's a lot of typing and it's a lot of thinking, and you're starting to get tired.
6) You mentioned earlier that you had a mentor assigned to you. Can you tell us a little bit about that and if you had just one mentor and if you had a study partner that you studied with and what was that like?
I selected the mentor, but it was all provided through the firm. I really valued having a mentor.
7) If there's one, single best advice that you would give to future CFE writers, what would that advice be?
Just stay calm and relaxed during the whole process.Without my mentor, I know I would have spiralled into a super stressed-out, high-strung state, during that whole 8-week and that is not what you need to do prepping for it.It's like what you said before about when you peak, you really want to peak at the end of the 8 weeks. If you are high-strung, if you're studying all night in week 2, you're not going to make it to week 8. For me that was really hard, because I'm used to [in] University studying all night, try to get the perfect answers, it was a really different study approach for me, but it was so essential, because I could have never maintained a full day and night study pattern for 8 weeks. On the day of the exam, I would have been totally burned out.
8) Let's go into a little more technical side of things, we spoke about case outlining and how you do Day 1 and Day 2 on the computer, can you walk us through the exact steps?
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