Study Notes

My brain is starting to think very much in terms of bonds, coupons, and yield to maturity. The words swimming around in my head look more like confusing acronyms or elusive words (MSRB, GO bonds, TANs, Section 8). 

Sometimes you have to be a grown up and spend time doing something that could be seen as really boring. Studying. I am being asked to to that. To move forward. To take on more responsibility. And that is an enormous privilege that I do not overlook as a mere tiny thing. It is a big thing. And I accept the challenge.

So my evenings look like this. A fat textbook that weighs as much as a stack of bricks sits on my table and a pencil and journal are ready for any essential notes I want to be sure to write out. First, I am reading. Then, I am going through all the practice questions, hundreds of them. It is practice, practice, practice. Memorization. Learning concepts and applying them to different ways they ask the questions to test you. I feel like it is slow-going, but it cannot be done in one cram session over a weekend. A few months of studying is necessary.

As dry as this material can be if you are just reading it (sometimes my mind wanders to Narnia or somewhere lovely and without current yields), I must admit I love to learn. I like to be well-read and well-rounded in my knowledge. This financial sector of my life fits into my analytical side of my brain, where computations and collective concepts have lived and dwelt for many years. My college years trained me in it. And now I am expanding into an area less familiar to my former days, and becoming more familiar in the recent years.

All this long-winded prose is simply to say that my creative side of the brain has to make way for some important matters. There is just not enough time in the day to study the immensity of this material as well as spend all the time I wish to in my usual reading and writing indulgences. So if you are looking for me, you will find me somewhere in between municipal bonds and SEC rules and regulations. For a little while, anyway.