When I committed to CFA Level I for February 2026, I was in the middle of my Mechanical Engineering degree (Mechatronics) at UofT and working full-time as a Process Engineering Analyst at CIBC. That meant long days and late-night problem sets, not exactly a traditional “finance major” pipeline.
So I didn’t treat the curriculum like a collection of facts to memorize. I treated it like an engineered system: inputs, constraints, failure modes, and a target output (passing on the first attempt while not burning out). Ethics, FSA, Fixed Income, Equity weren’t just topics, they were subsystems with different weights and failure probabilities.
My primary resource was Kaplan Schweser: the Core package from day one, and the CFA institure Practice Pack added roughly six weeks out when mocks became the main driver. I built an Excel tracker that treated each reading like a node in a network, with time estimates, difficulty, and dependency structure. It told me where to push and where to accept “good enough”.
The hardest parts of the journey were FSA and Fixed Income. FSA forced me to slow down and build flowcharts for how statements connected instead of brute forcing ratios. Fixed Income only clicked when I reframed it as a control system and Taylor expansion problem, duration and convexity as approximations, not magic.
“I didn't approach this as a finance student would. I approached it as an engineer, decompose the system, identify the critical path, optimize for signal not noise.”