We are two weeks into the second semester of summer courses and time has been flying by. Between both of my classes, I have already read 13 textbook chapters this semester—McCombs professors do not mess around! This past week was especially busy between our Financial Accounting exam on Wednesday and our Introduction to Taxation exam on Friday (there was a bit of a sleep deprivation epidemic going around). Everyone in the program has at least some experience with Financial (Introduction to Financial Accounting is one of the program prerequisites, plus we were sent that whopper of a self-study packet I mentioned in my previous post), so some material is familiar there, but Tax is different because it is completely new to most of us. I definitely find tax interesting and I think it is wise for this class to be scheduled first thing so students can have time to feel out whether or not the tax track is something they would like to pursue. I know there are a few people in the class heavily considering it.

Both Brian Lendecky (Financial) and Terri Holbrook (Tax) have been great professors so far. They know summer courses are intense, so they make an effort to keep things fun and interesting. On Tuesday, Brian showed us a few methods for compiling a Statement of Cash Flows, one of which employed the formula: △Cash = △Liabilities + △Shareholder’s Equity – △Non-Cash Assets (a derivation of the standard accounting equation Assets = Liabilities + Shareholder’s Equity). Each time we would use the formula, he would call on a student to solve the equation and ask something along the lines of “What is 0 + 0 – 20,000?” The student would answer (always correctly of course), and then Brain would say “#1 accounting program in the country right here.” We laughed every time…or at least I did. Who knew Accounting could be so entertaining?