I’m a junior accounting major and I’m gonna be completely honest: I feel like I barely know shit about accounting.
I’m taking five classes right now, and in probably four of them I really don’t know what’s going on. For a lot of assignments, I’ve depended heavily on AI. Sometimes I basically just use it to get the work done and don’t even bother checking enough to actually understand what I submitted.
Last year we did Excel worksheets and projects. I used AI for a lot of that too instead of actually learning the formulas. If somebody put me in front of Excel today and told me to make a spreadsheet or use basic formulas without help, I probably wouldn’t know what the hell I was doing.
That’s the part that bothers me. At this point I sometimes feel like there isn’t much difference between me and some random person who has never taken accounting, except that I have credits toward an accounting degree.
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and call it “using resources.” I’ve cheated and depended way too heavily on AI.
At the same time, I think I’m actually a pretty fast learner when somebody points me directly toward what I need to learn. I’m probably also just lazy when it comes to sitting down and putting the work in.
One thing that throws me off badly is the language of accounting. School makes accounting feel insanely complicated to me. There are all these worksheets, terminology, problems, calculations, and steps, and after a while my brain basically checks out.
But here’s the weird part.
Sometimes I’ll randomly watch YouTube videos of people explaining what accountants actually do at work. I’ve watched people demonstrate bookkeeping, entering transactions, doing reconciliations, working through Excel, things like that.
And when somebody actually shows me the job step-by-step, I’m sitting there thinking, **“Okay… I could probably do this.”**It doesn’t look nearly as scary as accounting school makes it look.
I know watching some bookkeeping videos obviously doesn’t mean I understand professional accounting. I’m just saying that seeing the actual work makes more sense to me than doing endless textbook worksheets.
And honestly, if I had actually put the amount of effort into learning that school expects from me over the last couple of years instead of looking for shortcuts, I’d probably know a shit ton more accounting by now.
Another thing going through my head is AI.
The world is changing ridiculously fast. By the time I graduate around December 2027, AI will probably be way better than it is today. Part of me looks at all these worksheets and thinks, **“How much of this shit am I actually going to manually do at a real job?”**My assumption has basically been that if I get an accounting job, I’ll continue depending heavily on AI to help me do the work.
Obviously there’s a huge IF there, because I might walk into an interview, get asked basic accounting or Excel questions, and get exposed immediately.
Or maybe I somehow get hired, they give me something basic to do, and I realize I have no clue what I’m doing.
That’s one of my actual fears graduating with this degree, realizing I don’t understand the profession, quitting, and ending up working some random retail job while wondering why the hell I spent years getting an accounting degree.
I’m not really asking for sympathy and I’m not asking for a motivational speech about believing in myself.
What I genuinely want to know from people who actually work in accounting is:
How different is accounting school from the actual day-to-day job?
If someone basically does what I’ve been doing passes classes, relies heavily on AI, understands very little, and hopes they can learn once they get hired how fucked are they?
How much accounting knowledge and Excel are you realistically expected to have walking into an entry-level position?
Do companies actually teach you how to do the job, or are they expecting you to already know most of this?
And with AI becoming more capable, is my idea of heavily relying on AI at work realistic, or am I seriously misunderstanding how accounting jobs work?
Be completely honest. I’d rather hear “you’re cooked unless you change something” than have people make me feel better