CFA Level 1 test while in Business School

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homie

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I'm a first year full-time MBA student and considering taking L1 this June.

Anybody with experience in this want to chime in?

During your free time, how much time was spent on school-work study and cfa study?

How many hours a week did you dedicate to the cfa study while you were going to school? How many hours to actual school work?


BTW, this is assuming I secure my internship position this summer. Because if I get an internship and don't study, I'll be chilling anyway...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 12:19AM by homie.
 
'Sup homie?

No experience in this area but I am curious about your interest in writing the 2009 exam with a 2006 join date. Been mulling it over for a few years?
 
I would recommend doing it - you'd most likely be done with mico, macro, financial acctg, and some type finance class by then, so you'd have like 80% of the material pretty fresh in your mind. You might have to cut down on the drinking a bit, but I think you'd live.
 
homie,

i just did this exact thing last year. there is a LOT of overlap between the CFA Level I and your first year of business school. if I had to put a number on it, I'd say 60%. this means that the more you pay attention in class, the less you will have to study for the CFA. Last year, I studied for the month of January, then got busy with school and internship searching and didnt pick the books back up until after school got out (early May). But because there was sooo much overlap between the material, I was able to cram in May and do fine. So taking Level I during your first year of B-school is actually a huge advantage to not being in B-school (especially if you have never had business classes before). I highly recommend it.
 
i did it, do it. start now, lots of overlap and you have an advantage
 
I have a friend who did it and swears by it. He said it particularly helped with L2 because he matched it up with some advanced finance courses. I am in a part time MBA program and I agree that there is a lot of overlap between L1 and your first year's classes.
 
If you're not busy withjob search, you will have plenty of time. If you are off between Mid-May and exam day, you will have enough time to study for the exam then, given the overlap from MBA.

BTW: L1 is cake.
 
L1 is more finance than you will receive in B school (unless you are in some weird quant program....which based on %...you probably aren't in).


Study L1 and school will be cake.


I never studied during my last year of grad school while taking L1. Didn't have to.
 
FINforLIL Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> L1 is more finance than you will receive in B
> school

not really, if you go to top 20 and major in finance and accounting, your statement may not hold up. bottom line here is strong overlap. To original poster- go for it!!!
 
I dont know where you guys went for your BBA/MBAs but there is no way that L1 is more finance then what you *should* receive in Bschool. Level 1 was like a super Series 7/CSC compared to what I learned in undergrad.

daj224 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> FINforLIL Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > L1 is more finance than you will receive in B
> > school
>
> not really, if you go to top 20 and major in
> finance and accounting, your statement may not
> hold up. bottom line here is strong overlap. To
> original poster- go for it!!!
 
FINforLIL Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> L1 is more finance than you will receive in B
> school (unless you are in some weird quant
> program....which based on %...you probably aren't
> in).

I hope this is not even remotely true. The finance material on the lvl1 exam is a joke that any intro to finance class, mba or undergrad should more than cover. The material on the cfa is all very easy - the only difficulty lies in the volume of it.
 
I took the CFA while in B-School and it worked out perfectly. I actually recommend taking level 1 in Dec and level 2 in June of your 2nd year. There is less time in between to forget things. Nice thing about business school is that you can focus studying more intensely over a shorter period of time. For level one I studied about a month (large number of hours/day) and then took a month off in May before I started my job to study for level 2, worked out great, felt like it was a lot easier than having to study for level 3 in between work the next year, just my $.02
 
I would say the material on level 1 could have been done while in my last year of undergrad in Finance.

So far my experience in MBA finance is that the intro material is closer to level 1, then the more advanced stuff is similar to level 2. Level 3 seems to be its own beast however.
 
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