The CFE

This week, after months of preparation and years of study, I completed the Common Final Exam (CFE) for my accounting designation, and I certainly wasn't a notice leading up to this point. In 4 years at BCIT I wrote close to 100 exams in 48 different courses, and 4 of the 6 prior CPA modules also pretty grueling finals.

However, the CFE is designed to be particularly nightmarish. Three days, 14 hours, 5 cases, zero time to stop and think or make mistakes, and that's just if things are running smoothly.

 

I debated taking a picture of the convention center exam room but decided against it given how strict they are about everything and how boring a photo it would be. Fortunately, Hieronymus Bosch did a pretty good job of catching the details. You can see the candidates being funneled in the lower right corner, before being charged one more time at admissions and eventually prostrated in preparation to write.

Of course I'm kidding, in actual fact the CPA is much stricter regarding items permitted on the premises than a lazy pack of demons, and were much more thorough in searching for prohibited items like mechanical pencils and scarves.

Day 1 and 3 went reasonably smoothly, all things considered, but Day 2 was an absolute disaster.

Somehow, despite having literally years to prepare for this day, the computer servers were completely unable to log-in everyone, so most of Western Canada started hours later. We had a 3 hour delay, and before you think that doesn't sound bad, just know that most of us had 2-6 hours of sleep the night before and were therefore caffeine and sugar crashing from exhaustion just as we were supposed to start a 5 hour test. The case itself was enormous and pretty miserable on top of that. People writing in Edmonton were apparently there for 12 hours...

When I started this whole journey, my friends used to joke about the diploma being the Fellowship of the Ring, with a bunch of friends starting out on a journey together and things going generally alright. By the Two Towers, everyone is fractured and chasing after different objectives, just like part-time night school. Finally, by Return of the King, its down to a few people, well beyond exhaustion, trudging through a fiery hellscape. I was incredibly glad to have my friend Julia with me through the whole thing. We wrote mock exams together, grumbled nearly every week for two years, and both made it through. I forget which of us is Sam or Frodo in the picture above.

Now I just get to kick back until December when the marks are released...

FINAL final

 In preparation of the last test I would write at BCIT, I took a wander around the campus and wished a fond farewell to many places that have been at the center of my day-to-day for a very long time indeed. I was delighted to find that the theatre in SW5 was opened into the same single room that I had mentioned in my valedictorian speech and I had to grab a quick victory selfie in the same spot where the whole process began so long (yet not very long) ago.

 I spent a lot of time chatting with and learning from my various instructors over the years, so it was very pleasing to go up to their floor and find every door closed and everyone away. With a new term starting in a few days, they'll need all the rest they can before starting another year over and it felt very proper that there was nobody left to tell me anything else before finishing my last test. To all the fine faculty and instructors on campus, thank you so very much for your time and attention while I frantically turned my career around :)

 I kept this pencil on my desk for my last few finals as well. It's writing days are done, but I felt it was very important to remind myself what this whole process had REALLY been about now that I was hours away from completing my degree.

 

Now I just have to wait for the final marks to be posted before getting ready for another 2 years in my designation.

BCIT: Home Stretch

 It's been a couple of years since I shared any photographs of the BCIT Campus, despite having been there either 2 evenings or 5 days a week for the last four years. Now that I'm in the home stretch of final exams in my last term, I thought I'd share a few pictures of some of the places I've spent so very much time. Starting off with the entry plaza of the main admin building. I've had a number of classes and study nooks in this building and it has a more interesting architecture than most so it worth a look.

 The library was my haven for many hours just before exams. With 2 sets of silent study rooms, there's always been a good place to hunker down and refresh your brain of the course fundamentals. And when that part of your brain is full, the magazine racks were fantastic for getting informed and entertained on a wide range of topics.

 When the weather would permit, this was my favorite spot of all. Tucked away behind the gym and off the radar of 99% of people, this little covered study area was a great way to absorb some concepts AND relax outside. Guichon creek runs right behind it and in the spring and summer it was the perfect place to watch baby ducks, herons, or (at least this term) a muskrat in its comings and goings.

Awards season

 Each time I apply for any sort of scholarship/bursary at BCIT, I never hear a thing back, but every now and then the system gives me awards I didn't even know where up for grabs.  This was my 4th scholarship, and I was delighted to be one of six people in the part time degree program to receive it. Better yet, I was able to share it with several clever and talented people I have had the good fortune to get to know over the past 16 months.

My friend Julia (left) helped get me through tax, audit, and finance, and we're taking another course together in January before she finishes her degree entirely. Luba (right) was in one of my courses and is always outspoken and on topic. Derek (absent) has had a few courses with me and also do a great job of participating and generally keeping things moving ahead. We were all given our awards by Jennifer Kerr (centre) who has been an incredibly helpful and supportive instructor in both the diploma and degree programs.

Congrats to my fellow scholarship winners and thanks to the staff and BCIT and people who oversee the Linda and Allen Stefanson Memorial Awards for their support. I've been doing courses back to back this term and its been particularly exhausting when combined with a busy job, but moments like this really helps make it all feel worthwhile.

Officially escaped visual effects!

 Having recently had my 3 month review at Bardel and not been fired for gross incompetance, I think its fair to say that my accounting career is on track with my labour-camp days in film behind me. Crossing that threshold, I thought I would share a few photos of the office and its features. Below is a picture of our office, which is really an unremarkable collection of cubicles, but there are 2 things I would like to highlight here:

1. This is the biggest desk I have ever had. It's not grand my any stretch, but its nice.
2. Sure, the view is of an overpass, but this is the first time I have worked in a room with windows in my professional career, including every job I have had since 1998 (except three months in a video store I guess).

 The office is a stones throw from Granville Island, which gives me a nice bicycle commute that I can share with Kathryn when our starting hours overlap. Its even a pleasant 40 minute walk on days where I have somewhere else to go after work and don't want to lug a bike around with me.

 Bardel has had turtles (though not these particular turtles) for several decades and their new tank is right outside the accounting office. They have it pretty good with room to swim about and a spot to haul out under a timed heat lamp, but there's something particulary hilarious about this pose to me. Maybe its saying something about visual effects, or business in general, or the human condition as a whole, but one turtle being resignedly pushed to the bottom of the tank while the other stands on his back and strains as far as he can to just get his head above water was too good a photo for me to pass up.

Convocation and Valedictorian Speech

After 2 very stressful (but in hindsight very quick) years, I graduated from the BCIT Accounting Diploma Program. Both sets of parents came out for the ceremony along with my lovely Kathryn, which really reinforced what a special event it was for me. I have several years of part-time schooling to go before I complete my degree and then my designation, but this certainly marked the cut-off point where I quit worrying about returning to VFX and officially began my new career.

The ceremony was in a church near the BCIT campus which comfortably sat the board and top instructors from several programs along with 230-ish graduates and 1200-ish guests, so that seemed like a good excuse to try out New Professional George and deliver the Valedictorian address. A few years ago I would have hidden in the back, but now I am quite comfortable talking infront of large groups of people, so long as I have time to prepare.

Since BCIT was very clever and recorded the whole ceremony, I have easy access to my speech, and to save anyone else from having to sift through 2+ hours of people in funny hats receiving awards, I have edited out just my speech below:

Scholarships

 I got a few emails last month stating that I had won two scholarships for the previous school year and there would be an awards ceremony on November 5th. When we got there I felt very underdressed and outclassed by a room full of academic and business top brass in fancy suits, but I managed to bumble my way through the experience all the same. Below is a picture from one corner of the room to show the layout of the room and density of formal people.

 Being a giant nerd last year, I apparently had the top mark in my program which earned me the "BCIT Foundations Scholarship" from the faculty of BCIT. Below is a picture of me receiving my cheque from a representative of the school.

 I was also one of two recipients of the "KPMG Award" (for those outside the industry, KPMG is one of the four large accounting firms in the world, so catching their attention is pretty humbling and exciting). The gentleman on the left was the presenter on behalf of KPMG and the young lady in the middle was the other winner of the award.

 

I feel very honored to be recognized for my efforts and it certainly reinforced that doing something else with my time was a good idea overall. Congratulations to the other award recipients and thanks to all the donors and attendees.

Back to School and Summer Job Roundup

 We had a wonderful getaway to Telegraph Cove over the Labour Day long weekend, but before we get to that I'd like to do a quick post about my summer job and heading back to school for year 2 (of 2). I had a great summer gig at Bardel Entertainment doing Excel spreadsheet data and will continue to do some part-time freelance for them in the coming year, which is nice. It was very fun to transition from the art side to the business side and see film production from an entirely different perspective.

 For my friends still in vfx: if the image below doesn't look like a fun summer then don't get into accounting :) I spent 3 months working in Excel 8 hours a day creating templates for Bardel to track the finances of their various productions and help consolidate that for quarterly reports. I also did some basic entry level accounting tasks and learned an absolute ton.

 And here's the lineup for the coming term. The first week is always a pain getting caught up on reading as every course has a few chapters right off the hop that are full of technical terms but not complex enough to warrant longer coverage so there's a sudden surge to read 100+ pages of dense material in each book. For those of you not familiar with it, and to give scale to the widths of that stack, the Income Tax Act (at the bottom) is 2000+ pages of 8 point legalese text and a guaranteed cure for insomnia.

 

In Summary: It was a good summer, its going to be an intense and demanding 9 months, but after this push I will be totally employable in my new field and already have some contacts and experience for when I come out the other end.

BCIT: Year One Marks and Thoughts

 Final marks have come in and the first year of my two year diploma course at BCIT is officially over and passed. While it was a pretty intense workload I would totally recommend going back to school for any of my friends in vfx that have long since lost the love of the art and don't know if they can keep up the routine for another 30 years. Its terrifying for the first few weeks because its such a huge change, but its also exciting to be learning new skills and fun to meet new people and maybe realize you're not as old as you sometimes feel.

 So I thought I'd share my marks AND newfound statistics skills with everyone via the box plot below, which aggregates the marks from my 17(!!!!!) courses in the past year and breaks them up into quartiles according to distribution. I won't bore you all with each and every one, but my lowest mark at 84% was a tie between Communications 1 and Principles of Management, both of which have a heavy group project mark which I will attribute at least some of the slip to. At the far end of the spectrum, due to a generous marking system I got 101% in Computerized Accounting, and all averaged out I managed a 92% (weighted) average for the first year.

 I'll round out this post with a few common questions I've had from people in the last year:
Q: Can you do my taxes?
A: Weirdly enough there is more to accounting than mastering the Canada Tax Code. Going in I was sure that I'd be doing everyones taxes by this point as well, but there's actually a lot more to learn in there and I've really only scratched the surface with a ton of introductory courses. So I can technically do your taxes, but probably not much better than you can ;)

Q: Do you miss vfx?
A: That I do not. Not the work, not the clients, not the hours, not the environment, not the constant pressure to line up my next gig. I miss many of the fine people that work in the industry, but have kept up with many of them, and with summer and weekends I hope to be a little more accessible for maintaining friendships better than the last few years.

Q: Wouldn't it be funny if you ended up doing accounting for a film company?
A: Funny how things work out sometimes, but I just do 9-5:30 and my weekends are my own. haven't opened Nuke or Maya the whole time but log a lot of time in Excel and Simply Accounting, both of which the past term prepared me for.

Thanks to all my excellent teachers, my loving wife, and all my supportive friends over the past hectic and amazing year. Looking forward to September and all the challenges that will come with it.

The Ordeal of Finals and the Catharsis of Bowling

 So last week was the end of first year and concluded with a battery of 5 finals in 4 days (2 having been written the week before) to wrap up the current batch of courses. All 5 were written in the gym and given that you can probably all visualize a school gym full of desks, I decided to skip a picture of it entirely as part of the healing process.

 On the friday after the last exam (Working Capital Management) a group of the people from my set headed out for some bowling and escape from the financial education system. After a week of quickly trying to retain information to churn out answers, having a chance to drink beer and lob heavy objects around to knock down pins seemed like an excellent idea. I had never done 10 pin bowling before and did alright considering.

 Below is a picture of everyone that came out, given that our set had only 26 people or so we had a pretty good turnout and it was nice to visit and joke about with people outside of school and without the spectre of exams hanging over us any more.

BCIT - First Month In

 So its been a full month since I decided to trade in a regular paycheck for a backpack of books and the hope that a few years from now it will all be worth it. Thus far BCIT has been a very good experience even if I am 8-15 years older than most everyone else in my class. The campus itself is nice without being sprawling and the majority of our classes are in a handful of buildings, so after the first week of disorientation passed it has been pretty easy to find my way around.

 The classes are divided into lectures and labs with lectures taking place in large halls like the one shown below. The finance intake for the year was several hundred students so we are divided into 'sets' of around 30 people. Lectures will contain 4-6 different sets and labs are more focused on a single set with more attention and back-and-forth with the teacher. Labs are typically in small classrooms which I have skipped a picture of since they are identical to any classroom you've ever had in your life. And yes, I am a big nerd and sit in the first few rows of every class, so this photo is not my typical perspective on lectures ;)

The first words out of the Deans mouth on the first day were "midterms are just 5 weeks away" and we've already had a number of high-stakes tests and midterms with 2 more to go in the coming week. So far I think I have done well on all the tests and I'm keeping my head above water with my reading and homework. Its nice that I can focus on my studies and not work until summer since the courseload is pretty heavy but there are a few people in my set working 20+ hours a week who I do not envy much.

So Long Visual Effects!

 Many of you have heard about this for the past 18+ months, but for those of you that don't already know, I am attempting the often dreamed of but rarely executed Plan B of Visual Effects.... going back to school and trying to learn something else to pay the bills while hoping its a step up. My good friend Jason Booth made a demotivational poster much like the one below in 2005 during Superman Returns which was widely accepted as one of the most toxic and badly managed vfx productions of its time.

 Jason moved on to other things not long after but many of us have stuck it out for years. I moved to Vancouver and worked in a bunch of shops, every time thinking that the next one would be the one that had things under control and didn't crush you with overtime and mismanagement. I have since likened it to the scenario of complaining that all the male crackheads you've had as room mates keep stealing your stuff and hopefully living with a female crackhead will solve the problem.

The issue is not the gender, its the fact that you're dealing with a bunch of crackheads.

Beyond the long hours and the unstable working routine, the average compositor workstation no longer appeals to me and seems to get darker by the year. The picture below is without exaggeration what most companies are like these days. Staring into a bright monitor in a black windowless room for 9-14 hours a day. Blech.

Not that VFX was all bad. I met some great friends, learned a lot of cool computer tricks and have my name attached to dozens of movies with varying levels of watchability, but its time for me to have a change. It was a fun job in my 20s, a frustrating job in my 30s and not something I want to entertain in my 50s. All the very best to my many friends that continue to stick it out in the dog-eat-dog business, you're doing great work. It just needs to be 3% less cyan and feel a little less janky... and its cut.... ;)