Guest Blogger Zach Sumner’s Experience with Gleim Compassion

I got an email a couple days ago, and it really spoke volumes about the kind of review system Gleim has in place. Whenever you log on to their system, you have the opportunity to set up a study plan. It’s not set in stone – it is difficult sometimes to dedicate an hour a day, every day in a week. But it is there to help you keep to a pace of study that is both manageable and progressive: bite sized enough to not make you feel overwhelmed but substantial enough so that each session isn’t broken down into a thousand minute pieces.

As is occasionally the case, I have really fallen behind on how often I study. Midterms are coming up, I’m trying to figure out where to apply for grad school, and I work full time, so finding a spare hour or two is like winning a lottery and going home with a few hundred dollars. Anyway, I’m going about my (reprehensibly busy) day, and I looked at my phone and saw an e-mail. “You have fallen behind on your CMA Part 1 Study Plan.”

Inside was an email from the advisor who has been assigned to me asking if I felt it necessary to ease back on my studying. My advisor was essentially asking whether the pressures that we all experience were getting to be too much.

The merging of learning and compassion – not in a trite way where a company sends you an e-mail wishing you a happy birthday, but the real sort where it actually guides what they offer you – is something relatively new in education, but its advent is welcomed. Life gets in the way for everyone to varying extents. I went to a community college before I transferred to the University of Central Oklahoma, and I can tell you firsthand how many of my classmates were single mothers or guys working blue collar jobs that had emergencies come up.

The heart of the matter is that while we all want to devote our time to becoming better, sometimes things happen. And when things happen, as they inevitably will, the response of those we trust for one of the most important things in the world, teaching us, has a direct bearing on our ability or lack thereof to stay the course. Education is the outcome of focused and disciplined compassion, of holding people to high standards and then providing them dignity if they fall.

It is such a small thing, an e-mail, but it suggests volumes. Over and over again, the lesson of accounting is that little things stack up. An increase in earnings per share of just a few pennies can be worth millions in economic gains, and decreasing fixed costs in a manufacturing operation by a few percentage points can save as much money as some companies spend on advertising. Small things matter.

And someone checking up on me, making sure I’m doing okay and I’m not going at a breakneck pace?

That matters too.