Her hard work paid off.
Marcia Butastas, 21, is now a certified public account and part of the Cebu City office of the SyCip Gorres Velayo & Co. (SGV & Co.), a multidisciplinary professional services firm.
Butastas was hired for the job about a week after she took the October 2017 Certified Public Accountant Licensure Examination (CPALE).
She said that she is only waiting for advice as to when she will officially start to report for work.
Butastas told Cebu Daily News in a phone interview that she remains in a state of disbelief for everything that has happened to her life in less than a month.
The working student from the University of San Carlos (USC) was the only one from Cebu and the Visayas who made it to the top 10 of the October 2017 CPALE with an average of 89.33 percent.
She shared the 10th spot with Louize Allaine Areño and Christine Mae De Leon, both from University of Sto. Tomas.
Butastas said that she never expected to make it to the top 10 of the CPALE because of the very hard exam questions. All that she was praying for was to pass and become a certified public accountant.
“I was really anxious that I took the examination this October since there are two new topics that were added by the BoA (Board of Accountancy) in the exams that were not really tackled much during undergraduate study and review,” Butastas told CDN.
Because of the difficult examination questions, only 4,511 or 30.45 percent of the 14,813 total number of examinees passed the October 2017 CPALE.
The University of the Philippines – Diliman campus was hailed as the top performing school with 100 percent passing rate followed by the De La Salle University-Manila (92.66 percent), University of Sto. Tomas (91.99 percent) and Ateneo de Zamboanga University (80.39 percent).
The CPALE was held in the cities of Manila, Baguio, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, Legaspi, Lucena, Tacloban and Tuguegarao on October 7, 8, 14 and 15, 2017.
Butastas said that she was sleeping in their hometown in Biliran province on Thursday when a sibling woke her up to inform her of the examination results.
She said that even her father could hardly believe that she made it big in the CPALE.