Mia Furnanz received her degree from Indiana University in Accounting and Law, Ethics and Decision-Making (LEAD) in 2022.
Why did you choose to major in accounting?
When I first started at Kelley, I decided to major in Finance because I thought it would lead to more career opportunities for me. However, once I had taken A100 and A211, it became clear to me that Accounting was something I really enjoyed, so I decided to add it as a second major. At the time, I still thought I would go with the Finance career route because I didn’t understand the variety of different career options that were available to me as an Accounting student. However, as I began taking more advanced Finance and Accounting classes, I realized that I enjoyed the Accounting classes more and decided to start looking into career options that would be possible with Accounting. This was where I discovered the field of Forensic Accounting, the industry I currently work in, and which ultimately led me to drop the Finance major and focus on my other interests, like critical thinking and law, within the LEAD double major.
Was there a course/project/group/interaction, etc. at Kelley that has been particularly helpful to you in your career?
Because I don’t work in a traditional accounting career, like Audit or Tax, a lot of the work I do is learning on the job. However, the most applicable project that I worked on at Kelley was the final course project for Audit. In this project, we identified patterns for fraud in financial statement data within IDEA and ran queries to determine irregularities and instances of potential financial misstatements. On a project I worked on in my first year at EY, I was given a project’s general ledger data and was tasked with identifying transactions that were possibly linked to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) violations. Similar to the analysis we performed in the Audit final project, I had to query and analyze this data to determine irregular transactions and potential red flags within the data.
What was your favorite part of being an accounting student at Kelley?
I think the best part of being an Accounting student at Kelley was the vast range of business knowledge I gained and the professors’ focus on encouraging students to fully learn and understand the material. I think the ICORE and pre-requisite curriculum at Kelley is what really sets it apart as a business school and prepares people for their careers. Going into the Accounting field, you can’t only know Accounting topics really well but you also need to understand business, law, information systems, etc. I think Kelley, and the Accounting major specifically, prepares its students really well by requiring students to take classes like communications, business law, data analytics and information systems.
Drawing on your career experiences, what advice would you give to future Kelley Accounting students?
Focus on your writing and communication skills. Accounting is a very technical major and, while you will be doing technical work throughout your career, most work culminates in some sort of presentation, memo or report where you need to clearly articulate technical items to clients, regulators, lawyers, etc. The Accounting major does a great job of requiring classes like Communications for Accountants and the research paper in the Taxes and Decision-Making class. However, I would recommend taking additional classes where you can focus on your writing skills. These don’t even have to be business communication classes. You can also take these classes as electives or for your A&H requirements, focusing on topics you are interested in. For example, I took a Young Adult Fiction class and the Race and the NBA class that Clark Barwick teaches, which were both fun classes that also focused on developing writing skills.
What was your favorite accounting class at Kelley?
My favorite accounting class at Kelley was Advanced Financial Accounting (A-422). I enjoyed this class because it was the most technically complex class I had taken at IU and I really liked how it challenged me and how much I learned. A-422 provided me a fuller picture about the items that go into a financial statement and led me to understand all of financial accounting more clearly. I also think this class best prepared me for the FAR section of the CPA because the content covered in this class was a large portion of the test. Roshan did a great job explaining complex topics in an easy to understand way that I likely wouldn’t have gotten if I had only seen this content for the first time during my Becker course.
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