NOVEMBER 2023
ACCY Update
From the Department Head
Dear Colleagues and Friends, We have a lot to be grateful for and excited about this year in the Department of Accountancy. As we continue to innovate, push boundaries, expand access, and transform education, we’re thankful for the learners, alumni, faculty, staff, and friends who help make it all possible. And we continue to look forward to the future. As we educate the next generation of accounting professionals, we also monitor both industry and educational trends and consider innovative solutions for tomorrow’s leaders in the profession. We’re encouraged about where we’re headed. In this issue of ACCY Update, you’ll meet our five new faculty members, who all bring a vibrant passion for teaching and research to the Department. You’ll also hear an alum’s story of how the Master of Accounting Science program helped her rise through the ranks at a popular beverage company, as she looks back on what she learned and shares unique memories from her time in the Department. You’ll learn more about how we continue to spread access to world-class education,
“As we educate the next
generation of accounting professionals, we also monitor both industry and educational trends and consider innovative solutions for tomorrow’s leaders in the profession.
”
highlighted by a new accounting certificate for learners in the Danville Correctional Center. And you’ll read about how one associate professor is changing the way students learn about data analytics with an app-driven textbook. As we continue to welcome new learners and celebrate the accomplishments of alumni, we also celebrate our latest U.S. News & World Report rankings. The Department of Accountancy’s undergraduate program is once again ranked No. 2 in the nation. And Gies Business is once again a Top 10 public undergraduate business program, coming in at No. 7. The university ranked No. 35 overall (No. 12 in publics), its best ranking in more than 20 years. I’m excited about where this year will take us. Thank you for your support of our innovative programs and commitment to our incredible learners.
Sincerely,
Michael Donohoe Head, Department of Accountancy PwC Faculty Fellow
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Faculty News
NOVEMBER 2023
Introducing five new faculty members The Department of Accountancy is excited to welcome five new faculty members this fall. They’ll teach various undergraduate and graduate courses while pursuing a wide variety of research interests.
Yifei Lu
Yifei Lu, an instructor of accountancy, joins Gies Business from the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School, where he earned his PhD and master’s degree. Prior to that, he studied mathematical economics and earned his bachelor’s degree at Fudan University in China. He is teaching a graduate course, ACCY 570: Data Analytics Foundations, this fall and will pursue interdisciplinary research with an interest in areas outside of traditional accounting, like environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, among other topics. Assistant Professor Cassie Mongold earned a PhD from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Financial Accounting Standards Board in 2023. She became interested in pursuing academia after teaching night classes at the University of Oklahoma as an adjunct professor while working as a senior auditor at EY. Mongold will teach ACCY 301: Accounting Measurement & Disclosure this spring and will research topics like the role of financial reporting in decision-making.
Cassie Mongold
Lena Pieper
Lena Pieper joins Gies Business as an instructor of accountancy after completing a PhD from Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands in 2023. She also earned master’s and bachelor’s degrees at Maastricht University. Pieper is no stranger to Gies Business, having spent time in the College as a visiting PhD student in Spring 2022. Her passion for teaching led her to academia, but Pieper also brings research experience in auditing, leadership, and more. She will teach ACCY 301: Accounting Measurement & Disclosure this spring. Stefan Richter, an instructor of accountancy, comes to Gies Business from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He’s completing his PhD this fall after earning his Master of Business there in 2021. Prior to that, he earned industry experience at Gartner Inc. as an associate tax reporting manager and at EY as a senior tax professional. He completed a bachelor’s and master’s from Penn State. He currently teaches ACCY 312: Principles of Taxation, and his research interests include examining firms’ tax disclosures and assessing the effectiveness of tax policy.
Stefan Richter
Karneisha Wolfe (not pictured) joins Gies Business as an instructor of accountancy. Wolfe is completing her PhD from Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business this fall. After earning her master’s at Wake Forest and bachelor’s at the University of South Carolina, she gained valuable accounting experience at EY and XPO Logistics before pursuing her PhD. Drawn to Gies Business for its engaged student population, she currently teaches ACCY 301: Accounting Measurement & Disclosure and will pursue research in areas like audit judgment and decision-making, corporate governance, and financial reporting and disclosures.
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Featured Alumni
NOVEMBER 2023
“It’s provided me with
a strong foundation to
”
build my career on.
SHANNON JONES, FINANCE MANAGER MOLSON COORS BEVERAGE COMPANY
Alum credits MAS with propelling her career When Gies Business alum Shannon Jones (ACCY ’13, MAS ’14) chose to stay on campus for a fifth-year master’s degree after completing her bachelor’s, her decision was based mostly on the opportunity to prepare for the CPA exam. Ten years later, in her role as finance manager, she uses what she learned in the Master of Accounting Science program regularly – in ways she didn’t anticipate. Jones works as a finance manager at Molson Coors Beverage Company, supporting the company’s nonalcoholic and spirits teams. She’s responsible for helping the teams develop their annual budgets and monthly forecasts, analyzing the teams’ financial results, providing monthly reporting, and performing financial support and analysis to aid in decision-making. “Since the nonalcoholic and spirits businesses are new to Molson Coors and we are forging new partnerships and acquisitions, my team and I are involved in the process of integrating the financials, understanding how to properly record results, and understanding where the risk areas are highest. All of this was content that was addressed in the MAS program,” Jones said. Jones has worked her way up at Molson Coors, starting with MillerCoors as an accountant in 2015 prior to Molson Coors acquiring full ownership in 2016. Since then, she’s worked as a financial analyst and senior financial analyst before becoming a finance manager in 2020.
“I love the opportunity I have to work with these newer ventures for Molson Coors,” she said. “While we have our standard monthly processes, there is always something new and different going on. We have unique opportunities to drive results, affect change more quickly, and implement changes impacting a variety of processes. These opportunities are more prevalent than I would get supporting our more established businesses.” The MAS program also impacted Jones’ life in other unexpected ways. It’s where she met her husband, Nolan. The two Gies Business graduates married in 2020. While she credits the MAS program with helping her navigate and succeed in an influential role, she values her undergraduate experience as well. During her undergraduate years, Jones studied abroad for a semester in the Netherlands, living in a dorm in Rotterdam with students from around the world. “We traveled to a new country almost every weekend during my time there,” Jones said. “It was an incredible learning experience. Flights would get canceled, luggage would get lost, or we were on a tight schedule and needed to quickly navigate unfamiliar surroundings with people I recently met. It was a great opportunity to practice being flexible and pivoting when necessary. Both of these skills are so helpful in the working world.”
She also completed a global internship with KPMG in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the summer between her bachelor’s and master’s programs. Before the College was named Gies Business or launched its “Business on Purpose” promise, students like Jones were already making purposeful decisions to make an impact. During her sophomore year, Jones and a group of fellow students entered a case competition hosted by EY, tasking teams with creating a program that improved the community and reflected EY’s values. “We created Little Green Chefs, which was a program where we went into local schools and taught cooking classes to children using locally sourced ingredients,” Jones said. “We won $10,000 to implement our idea the following year.” Jones’ time in the College in both her undergraduate and graduate years helped prepare her for her future, allowed her to meet and network with people she still connects with today, and continues to influence her daily interactions. “It’s provided me with a strong foundation to build my career on,” Jones said. “Most notably for me, the University of Illinois helped strengthen my interpersonal skills – team projects, the career fair as a first-year student, interview prep. I now work with multiple teams with individuals who have different coaching and learning styles, so these skills are so important.”
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Making Education More Accessible
NOVEMBER 2023
Gies Business brings accounting certificate to Danville Correctional Center Learners in the Danville Correctional Center can now earn an accounting certificate through a joint project between Gies Business and the Education Justice Project (EJP) in the College of Education. This new initiative, which is part of a grant program created by Chancellor Robert Jones to address racism and social injustice, also increases access to business workshops and business-related books in the prison library. The EJP accounting certificate is a five-course program taught both in person and through recordings over a nine-month period. Students learn about balance sheets, income statements, and different types of transactions, finishing with a capstone project. Gies Business faculty members teach the courses with the help of volunteer partners. “In general, an education program is important for anyone at any stage in life, and it’s really important for our learners
“The students will be able to understand the language of
accounting and, therefore, find it very helpful because a lot of our students face difficulties
”
obtaining a job upon release. JESSICA THORNTON, PHD STUDENT
because it allows them to continue building skills,” said Jessica Thornton, a PhD student who serves as program manager for the EJP accounting certificate. “The students will be able to understand the language of accounting and, therefore, find it very helpful because a lot of our students face difficulties obtaining a job upon release.” Thornton explained that because of job discrimination, many of the learners choose to become entrepreneurs.
“This one certificate won’t give them all the skills they need to be an accountant in their business, but it will allow them to understand their accountant, make sure they’re making good decisions, and understand what’s going on in their business,” she said. The EJP courses and workshops go beyond the practical side of helping prepare learners for jobs after their release. They also foster growth – in the learners, instructors, and volunteers. “We’re really talking about opening up to populations that have limited access,” said Denise Lewin Loyd, associate dean for equity and associate professor of business administration at Gies Business. “This definitely is a population that is frequently overlooked, a population where I think, unfortunately, opportunities for engagement and enhancement are scarcer than we would like for them to be.”
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Innovating to Engage Learners
NOVEMBER 2023
App-driven textbook makes studying data analytics ‘irresistible’
Accountancy graduates achieve success Alumni from our bachelor’s and master’s programs continue to find success after graduating. Success can mean many things, but in this instance, “successful career outcomes” include graduates who secured a job or volunteer opportunity, entered the military, or continued their education.
“In essence, our goal was to make coding and data acquisition easy while also ensuring impactful visualizations and interesting data insights.” FEI DU, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ACCOUNTANCY
Fei Du, Gies Business associate professor of accountancy, has created a groundbreaking new textbook that makes data analytics-driven storytelling more accessible to learners. “Want to make something irresistible? Get to the fun part quickly,” Du said about Creative Data Analytics: Computational Recipes to Gain Insights into Businesses. She cowrote the comprehensive, app-driven textbook with Kelvin Mischo of Wolfram Research and Davis Mo, a student at Concordia International. “Our book is a simple and powerful tool you can use to quickly test your ideas and focus on the exciting takeaways and data insights you uncover,” Du said. “It empowers students to bypass the ‘academic choking’ of building code from scratch and apply a ‘computational recipe’ to a specific problem.” Learners can input their own data, often as easy as providing a web URL, and then click “Run Analysis” to see instant results. This unique approach sets it apart from
traditional eBooks and offers an interactive and dynamic learning experience. Du said she wrote this book, in part, to a younger version of herself who struggled with data work during her graduate studies. “I wished for a one-stop solution that could help me leverage multiple data types in one software environment,” Du said. “In essence, our goal was to make coding and data acquisition easy while also ensuring impactful visualizations and interesting data insights.” She believes that as businesses and educators begin to rely more on artificial intelligence, it’s important for students to learn how to ask the right questions and apply their critical thinking to algorithms used for data storytelling. “Computational thinking is a versatile and transferable skill,” Du said. “Once students grasp the fundamentals, they can leverage this knowledge to not only enhance their interaction with artificial intelligence applications, like ChatGPT, but also easily extend it to other business contexts.”
99 98
OUTCOMES
%
(2021-2022)
%
successful MAS* career outcomes within 6 months of graduating (2021-2022)
93
%
successful MSA** career outcomes within 6 months of graduating (2021-2022)
28
%
average pay increase reported by iMSA*** graduates (2022)
successful undergraduate career outcomes within 6 months of graduating
76
%
of iMSA*** graduates reported starting a better job (2022)
CURRENT ENROLLMENT BS in Accountancy: 642 BS in Accountancy + Data Science: 37 MAS: 172 MSA: 166 iMSA: 426 * Master of Accounting Science ** Master of Science in Accountancy *** Online Master of Science in Accountancy
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