Sorry for my late posting. I was in and out of connectivity all week. If you read my last post, you can see that I was traveling a lot last week. But after this week, life will return somewhat to normal as the formal fall recruiting season for public accounting comes to a close. It has been quite a ride this semester, to say the least.

I thought for this blog post I might give a little background into how I fell into the accounting world. It’s not often you meet someone who studied public relations and Spanish as an undergraduate who is now pursuing a graduate degree in accounting.

When I started college, I went in thinking I wanted to be a journalist. I loved writing, and I thought journalism would be a great way to see and experience many different things in life. And I still believe that. Though as anyone who has followed the media industry these past couple of years knows, faster and more modern forms of media are overtaking newspapers.

Knowing this, I quickly changed my major to public relations. Studying public relations allowed me to stay within the College of Communication while pursuing studies that I found interesting. I was always pulled more toward the promotion and marketing aspects of public relations. As such, I decided that it would be a good idea to complement my degree with a minor in general business.

Here is where the story starts to come together. In spring 2009, I enrolled in the Fundamentals of Accounting class that all business majors and minors have to take. It changed my life!

My professor was one of the funniest, most entertaining and informative professors I’ve ever had.

“I am not teaching you useless information,” she would often say. “I am teaching you things you will use in your business careers. I am teaching you things you will use in your lives.”

I remember one day she went on a rant about how she had been in a board meeting and someone did not know the different between gross profit and profit from operations. “If you don’t know the difference between gross profit and operational profit, you will look like an idiot!”

During that class, I feel in love with the subject material of accounting (please keep in mind that I am huge nerd). I found it incredibly interesting and powerful how everything a business does flows through to the financial statements. And when you are an accountant, you are very savvy at breaking down and analyzing a business’s operations. Moreover, when you are an auditor of a specific company, you become an expert in that company’s business.

So after talking to some family friends who were accountants and my professor in that class, I decided to explore the option of becoming an accountant. At that point, I knew I needed to be a CPA. But to be CPA in Texas, I basically needed a master’s degree in accounting. And to do that, I needed to have studied accounting as an undergraduate.

That is when I found out about McCombs’ MPA program. I could enroll in the program without having studied accounting as an undergraduate. Plan A was to apply to the MPA program and get in. Well, Plan A worked!

There is a good chunk of us that came from outside accounting here, and I love hearing how everyone ended up at UT. That’s the great thing about our program. It’s very diverse, which only adds a richer element to the learning environment here.