A Second Chance

During my undergraduate program, I was both an accounting major and a member of a non-business honors program. As such, this made my academic life very broad. Even though I was in business courses, I also got the opportunity to take philosophy courses, women's studies, and a plethora of others. While I did enjoy this, I felt like I was missing out on a lot of business courses. It's hard to take business electives when you have so many humanities courses. Coming to the MAcc program was like getting a second chance to explore business courses. Specifically, some of my favorites like Financial Modeling, Financial Statement Analysis, and Fraud. Let me share my thoughts on each!

• I'm not even sure if my undergraduate school offered a financial modeling course. This course was great because it followed Finance 1 and 2 in the first semester and really reinforced the concepts for me. We got to work pretty heavily in Excel and build valuation models based on cases. The professor had just come from almost a decade in investing, so he was able to focus the course on real-world applications.
• Financial Statement Analysis is not an easy class. If you've never even heard of financial statement analysis as a concept, it's even harder. However, I didn't let that stop me from registering. This class was really cool because we got to dig into-- surprise-- financial statements! As a future auditor, I was under the impression that audited financial statements should not be changed around. Imagine my surprise when we started reformulating the financial statements and coming up with different numbers to answer different purposes. Now I have an even deeper understanding of what goes into the financial statements and how stakeholders use them.
• Out of all the classes here that I was excited about, Fraud was at the top of my list. We got to learn about the different types of fraud, how people get away with them, and how to test for them. The professor always had great stories to illustrate his points and brought in guest speakers to help out. He did such a good job of teaching us how to commit fraud that the second half of the course - ethics - is basically a follow-up of why you shouldn't commit fraud!

My advice to incoming MAcc students, especially if they are not from OSU, would be to use their electives to take courses they've never been exposed to before. A class may seem intimidating or hard, but you only have one year in the MAcc program. If you're anything like me, this may be your last chance to take these interesting electives before you become a professional. Use your electives; don't waste them.