Spencer Fry

I just finished up an intense accounting and financial markets one-week class offered by NYU. (And before I go any further: getting up at 7:00 AM is the worst.) The reason I enrolled in this class was to become better familiarized with accounting and financial statement analysis. I don’t have time to dedicate the normal semester of learning to it, but everyone can take a week to better themselves in their field. So that’s what I did.

Overall, I’m really happy with the class offered by instructor John F. Mahoney, CPA. He’s a great, energetic middle-aged guy who is very passionate about accounting practices. He really knows his stuff and that shines through in his teaching method, which includes a lot of his real life experience.

On to the class. We began the class by going through companies’ annual reports, analyzing business transactions (balance sheet and income statement), utilizing T accounts, trial balance, general ledger, and so forth. We continued down the path of complex accounting such as ratio analysis and ended the class with profitability, investors’ ratios, and in-depth cash flow analysis. There was a lot in-between, which I won’t mention here, but you get the general gist. My brain already feels like it’s going to explode with how much we covered.

Sometimes stretching yourself too thinly on a wide range of topics is a bad thing, but in this case I think it was good. We covered 10 chapters of our accounting book (“Financial Reporting and Analysis” by Charles H. Gibson) as well as many handouts and other things. Why I’m happy we skipped around is because I got a taste of a lot of things and I can go back and further my understanding of what’s most important to me on my own. I now know of most of what’s involved, so I can pick and choose. For example, even though we covered preferred and commons stock, that doesn’t really apply to me at this time. Hopefully, it will one day.

The bottom line (see what I did there?) is that it was really nice being able to take this class to increase my knowledge of accounting and financial statement analysis. It’s not often that at my age (24) you’re still given the opportunity to be able to go back and learn something through a teaching program while still working – unless, of course, you’re going to grad or business school. I want to thank Jason and Dave for picking up the slack while I had my head in numbers all week. They’re the best people I’ve ever worked with and you will be in awe with what we’re coming out with soon. More on that later!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.