Written by guest blogger KP.
I have been making pretty steady progress on my studying so far – it was hard for me to find a groove while running into a busy part of my grad school semester, but now that I am nearing the finish of the semester, I would like to stay with about a chapter a week (and there are 13 chapters total). I am finishing up chapter 2 now, and that would put me about 3 months out for trying to take the exam. I am starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with how much material there is in part 1 compared to part 3, and it gets discouraging at times because it feels like I am never going to be able to understand it all. And of course, this makes me want to push out my proposed exam date even further. I would LOVE to be able to last 2 parts of the EA exam by December, but I am not sure if that is being too aggressive. After next week, I will have a month and a half off of grad school, which would allow me to set more time aside for studying at nights after work and on the weekends. I would love to be able to sit for the exam in July, so we will see how my studying goes over the next few weeks now that I am almost done with the semester.
One thing that I have noticed that is making my studying go a little bit longer is focusing a ton on the little details and not realizing how much information I am really retaining. For example, when I was studying for part 3, Circular 230 was a bit part of the exam and as I am sure many of you know, there is a lot of information in Circular 230. I got so lost in trying to prepare for every possible exam question, that it would take me forever to get through the information. Finally, I just started writing down the main points from the sections of 230 covered by Gleim’s Part 3 book and limited myself to only a half page of notes. When I did my final review using Gleim’s exam software, right before I took the practice tests, I glanced over the notes and realized how much information I really did retain just by looking over key points of information. It was like I would see a key word or phrase, and automatically it would all come back. I just have to trust that Part 1 (Individuals) will be the same and need to trust that I am really retaining what I need to know, with the help of Gleim of course 
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