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Introducing Our Alumni

Thought leadership at the intersection of accounting practice and accounting policy.

Meet past students who have made their way into the professional accounting world, and see if you can follow in their footsteps.

Why Ivey?

If you ask my family about what I was like when I was little, they would tell you that I was always trying to find a way to make a buck. From lemonade stands, to charging my parents ‘interest’ when they borrowed my allowance money, to selling various craft projects – I guess you can say that I’ve been a business woman since a very young age. As a result, I took every business and accounting course that my high school had to offer, and focused my university applications on business and accounting programs.

After much reflection, I decided that the strictly CA-focused program I had applied to wasn’t for me, as I wanted to have a variety of career options to choose from. Being a London-native, coupled with Ivey’s stellar reputation and program structure made it a no-brainer for me to set my sights on earning acceptance. Ivey allowed me to build a solid business foundation and I will tell anyone that asks, pursuing my HBA there was one of the best decisions I’ve made to date.

 

Why accounting?

When I was in high school, I thought that I wanted to be a lawyer, but I decided that this wasn’t the career for me after learning more about the profession through a co-op program. By the time I reached fourth year of university, I was convinced that I wanted to earn my accounting designation but I needed to make a choice as to which designation to pursue, as this was prior to the merger. After speaking with several people in the profession (both academic and non), I realized that management accounting was my calling as it would enable me to marry my passion for analytics with my interest in the consumer packaged goods industry. It was a difficult decision at the time since most of my Ivey peers were pursuing their CA designation, but I knew that CMA was the right one for me. The CPA, CMA designation has opened many doors, and my training as an accountant has enabled me to continue to add value while playing a key role in the decision making process.

 

How Ivey prepared me for CPA

While in the HBA program, I knew I was learning a lot but I don’t think I realized how relevant the case methodology was until I entered the real world. Completing approximately 600 cases not only taught us about a variety of industries, but it also taught us how to approach different business problems.  Additionally, the myriad of group projects were an invaluable way to build the much-needed soft skills that are required in the workforce. 

A lesson that the professors always stressed was to ‘make an assumption and move on’. As a student, this was simply a tactic to ensure that you were able to complete the assignment or test within the allotted time. In the workforce, there is no such thing as perfect information so there are many opportunities to apply this valuable lesson when building financial models or other analysis to support decision making.  After all, a deadline is a deadline!

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