News

Accounting in the Big Apple and Washington, D.C.


January 2017

Elizabeth Jenike

Every winter term for the past three years, a group of accountancy students has taken a trip to the east coast for a higher level ACCT course designed to show them the applications of their field. During the Accountancy Travel Program, they have a chance to visit some of the very important institutions in the world of accounting and get to see the sights along the way.

And, most importantly, they get a taste of what it’s like in the “real world” beyond their university work.

The trip was divided between two cities: huge, sprawling New York City with cramped hotel rooms, Wall Street in its full glory and the One World Observatory looking out over the whole region; and Washington, D.C., with plenty of museums and interesting events going on pre-inauguration.

As they do every year, the students visited the best of the best. Nielsen, The Clearing House, the SEC, KPMG and FASB/GASB were all on the itinerary, as were PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte. Many of these visits were made possible by Miami and Farmer School alumni - in fact, the president and CEO of The Clearing House, Jim Aramanda, graduated from Miami in 1973.

The trip was eye-opening in a lot of ways for the students. During their visits to these companies, students were exposed to the different ways in which they could use their accounting degrees and how accounting actually permeates every level of business - beyond simply taking a test to become a CPA to do taxes, there are real-world issues that accounting helps solve.

“The most valuable thing I learned was that there are so many things you can do with an accounting degree,” said senior accountancy major Megan Mumma. “Between working for Nielsen, the FBI or even the SEC, there are endless possibilities.”

Accountancy student group photo Accountancy student group at NASDAQ