Information About Darragh - Ballybunion tutor

Personal Description:

I am currently training to become a Chartered Accountant with one of the Big 4 accounting firms, working in their Audit and Assurance department. Presently, I am preparing to sit my Final Admittance Examinations (FAEs) with Chartered Accountants Ireland in August 2024. I achieved a First Class Honours in a Postgraduate Diploma in Accounting (NFQ Level 9) with Atlantic Technological University (formally Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology) in 2022. I then went onto pass my CAP 2 exams with Chartered Accountants Ireland on my first attempt.

Tutoring Experience:

I have provided assistance in preparing for accounting-based exams to university, Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate students on an informal basis, all of whom have found this to be extremely helpful. As my formal tutoring experience is limited, I am offering my services at a rate far below standard grinds fees.

As mentioned above, I have been very successful in accounting exams in recent years. I have been particularly successful in the area of Financial Accounting, which makes up 80% of the marks in the Leaving Cert Accounting Exam. I achieved an overall result of 93% in Financial Accounting in University and 74% in my CAP 2 exams with Chartered Accountants Ireland (CAI). I also achieved 79% in the recent Advanced Financial Reporting Assessment for FAE with CAI (the national average result in this exam was 54%). I am also at an advantage in being able to put myself in the student’s shoes given that I am currently studying for exams myself.

Approach to Grinds:

The key to achieving high marks in accounting is realising that practicing questions drives your learning. My approach to helping others prepare for their exams has this idea at the heart of it. Particularly for Leaving Certificate Accounting, the style of the exam is extremely predictable year on year, with a limited number of topics being examined. This means that for students who prepare well for this exam, a high number of points can be obtained for a relatively small amount of study time compared to other subjects. Where students often run into trouble when studying accounting is not knowing how to start a question and wasting hours trying to figure out how to do so. My aim is strip out this wasted time and allow students to get stuck into building up their skill and speed from the get-go.

I will provide live 1 to 1 tutoring sessions, focusing on the method of how to approach each type of question that may appear on the exam.

As well as this, I will provide students with pre-recorded videos of me doing past exam questions, which will not only explain to students how to get to the correct answer, but also show them exactly how to layout their solution on their exam paper so that they can complete the question in the most efficient way possible, and so the examiner finds it as easy possible to award them marks.

Finally, students will be able to contact me on WhatsApp if they run into difficulty with anything regarding their study for the subject. I believe this will be imperative to allowing students to study more efficiently, as a common pitfall for accounting students when practicing questions is spending too much time trying to figure out where a certain figure is coming from. My advice to students is, if you’ve spent more than 5 minutes trying to understand where a figure is coming from, and you’re still not sure, send me a WhatsApp message on it. I will get back to you as soon as I can, and you can move to something else rather than spending half the evening staring at one figure - trust me I’ve been there!