Classroom and caseload

I started doing accounting work in 2014, self-employed, out of Kanata. I finished the commerce degree in accounting in 2020. So for several years I was a student in a subject I was already being paid to practise, which sounds like an advantage and mostly felt like being two people who did not compare notes.

I assumed the two would eventually meet. That the coursework would catch up to the files, or the files would start to look like the problems in the coursework. Neither happened. They stayed disjoint for the entire overlap, and it took me years to understand that this was not a defect in either of them.

The map and the ground

A degree gives you the whole territory named at once, including the parts you will never visit. That is its actual product. Not the answers, the index. You come out knowing that a category exists, roughly where its edges are, and what it is called, which is what lets you look it up later when something in front of you starts to resemble it.

What a map cannot tell you is frequency. It gives equal weight to a treatment you will meet four hundred times and one you will meet once, because on a map they occupy comparable space. Nothing in a course says “this section will be ninety percent of your working life and this one will not come up”.

Casework teaches frequency and nothing else with any reliability. After a couple of years you know exactly which situations recur, in what proportions, and in what condition they tend to arrive. That is enormously valuable and it is also the shape of a keyhole. You know your own book. You have no idea what is outside it.

Where each one is silent

The silence in the coursework is classification. A textbook problem arrives already sorted. You are told this is a lease question, and the work is applying the treatment. Real files do not arrive sorted. Most of the actual difficulty in the job is deciding what kind of thing you are looking at, and that step has been removed from the exercise before you get it.

The silence in casework is worse, because it is invisible. Casework cannot tell you what you failed to consider. A file you handled badly because you did not know a rule existed looks, from the inside, exactly like a file you handled. There is no feedback. The error does not announce itself, and the client is not in a position to catch it either. That is the specific hole formal study fills, and the only way you find out it was filled is when a name from a course you half-slept through surfaces because something on a page rhymes with it.

The part I got wrong

For most of those four years I treated the degree as an administrative obligation. I was learning the real thing at work and collecting a piece of paper in parallel, and I was slightly smug about knowing which was which.

I had it inverted. The parts of the coursework that felt most useless, the theory, the reasoning behind why a standard says what it says rather than what it says, were the parts that later let me hold a position when somebody disagreed with me. Knowing the treatment lets you apply it. Knowing why it exists lets you tell whether the situation in front of you is the one it was written for.

I should also say the honest cost. Doing both at once did not make me better at either for a long time. It made me slower at both, and there were files that deserved a person who was only doing files.

What neither one gave me

Neither the classroom nor the caseload taught me how much time something deserves.

A file arrives and it is either a twenty minute file or a six hour file, and almost the entire quality of a career sits in reading that correctly. Nobody teaches it because it is not knowledge, and nobody learns it from volume alone, because volume rewards speed and speed is what makes you wrong about it. I have been doing this a long time and I still get it wrong in both directions, and I notice I get it wrong more often when I am confident.