"Accounting is how we communicate financial information in this world. You don’t learn this just for your job, but for your life."

- Rebecca Chesney

By Sommer Hamilton

Her grandmother always told her to be sure and get the kind of education that would weather any economic storm—and, of course, take her far. When Rebecca Chesney ’06 took her first accounting class, she knew she’d found the first half of the puzzle: no matter how the economy looks, accountants will always be in demand.

But she didn’t know just how far the Department of Accounting’s programs at Mays would take her until she had interned at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ New York office and accepted an offer to work with the Financial Accounting Standards Board in Connecticut following graduation.

For Chesney, the moment of revelation struck just as she wrapped up her spring 2006 internship, where she worked in PwC’s assurance division and completed the confirmation process for 80 JPMorgan funds. “It wasn’t just that I had made it in New York—that I learned the subway system, that I still have these little restaurants and parks that are my secret places in the city,” Chesney said. “It was more than an internship for me. It was a new city, a new experience, the start of my life as a professional. At the end I thought, ‘bring it on, world.’”

Chesney is just one of the 775 students supported by a department whose programs are today recognized among the top 10 in the nation. That ranking is not just for helping more than 215 graduates last year head straight to jobs in Big 4 accounting firms, but also for the quality of its faculty research contributions and its role as the single largest provider of certified public accountants in the state.

With Andersen Professor James J. Benjamin at the department’s helm for the past 25 years, accounting at Texas A&M has grown from a quiet little regional program to one of the leading spots in the nation to learn and research accounting practices. In addition to state funding, the department runs on a $19 million endowment—among the biggest in the U.S.—created by former students and businesses to support student scholarships, faculty teaching and research endeavors, and the continuous enhancement of the accounting curriculum.

That endowment is the result of careful integration of Big 4, middle-market and large regional accounting firms’ needs into a curriculum designed to prepare students for the practices of tomorrow. In the past year alone, the department has added a forensic accounting course and made major revisions to such courses as tax research.

“We work very aggressively to build and maintain those relationships with firms,” Benjamin says. “Not just to help students get good jobs, but also to keep our curriculum up to date and to keep our programs on par with the latest needs of the accounting profession.”

The Professional Program is the department’s flagship component, with a quarter of all business students at Texas A&M graduating from the five-year program that allows them to earn a BBA in accounting along with a master’s in accounting (with an option in audit, tax or entrepreneurship), finance, information systems, or marketing.

First launched in 1992 to prepare students for increasingly rigorous CPA requirements, Professional Program students are today accepting sign-on bonuses for their internships. Almost all in the program know months in advance where they’re going to hang their professional hats after graduation, with a near-100 percent placement rate at commencement.

Give ’em something to talk about
The story of the department’s growth to 6th-ranked program in the nation is one of the right combination of resources at the right time, Benjamin explains.

Interest in accounting has soared since the scandals at Enron and Worldcom, coupled with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and stricter regulations on financial reporting, have given the accounting profession a lot more work these days. At the same time, Texas A&M’s expansive faculty reinvestment program has played a major role in boosting the Aggie accounting program’s reputation in recent years.

With the addition of nine new faculty members over the past two years (three more are set to start work this fall) has come a rise in the number of new faculty applicants graduating from such top-tier business programs as Michigan, Stanford, and California-Berkeley. That reputation for A&M accounting also means more and more quality applicants for Mays’ accounting PhD program. In short, the enriched faculty enabled by former A&M President Robert M. Gates’ hiring plan “has got people talking about us,” Benjamin says.

They should have been talking long before now, some in the department say. Take doctoral student Michael Drake, a Brigham Young graduate and CPA who left Ernst & Young’s Salt Lake City auditing office in 2005 to continue his education in Aggieland. It was practically a fluke that he met faculty members in Texas A&M’s Department of Accounting through personal connections—but after visiting, he realized he’d found a true home for both his family and his research ambitions.

The department is set apart from the rest, Drake says, in the opportunities it offers aspiring researchers. “I’d be surprised if anyone provides more access to faculty earlier in the program than this department,” he explains. “I talked about a research idea just the other day with a faculty member I don’t even work with. From the first semester you’re here, you’re researching with faculty who treat you as a co-author, not just a research assistant.”

And that has impacted Drake greatly. In only his second year as a PhD student, he’s working with professors James Myers and Linda Myers on his first scholarly publications, examining how quality accounting disclosures can help investors make more informed decisions and predictions. His work so far has earned him a $25,000 Deloitte Foundation Doctoral Fellowship this spring—one of only 10 given out across the U.S.

‘For life’
Rebecca Chesney will spend the next year researching the impact of FASB’s accounting regulations, answering technical inquiries about specific accounting cases, and making presentations at FASB board meetings. She was one of 50 applicants selected for 5 positions with FASB, and she won’t be the only Aggie to join FASB after graduation this year. For the past two years, FASB has chosen two postgrad technical assistants from Texas A&M’s accounting program.

Chesney’s dream job after that might be a little different than most accountants—this personable and petite Aggie would love to be a business correspondent on a show like NBC’s Today Show. But no matter where her career takes her, Chesney says she already knows the language of business.

“Accounting is how we communicate financial information in this world,” says Chesney, who graduates this spring with her BBA in accounting and her master’s in finance. “You don’t learn this just for your job, but for your life.”