UW Certificate in Accounting

Hear an instructor, an alumnus and a student of the University of Washington Certificate in Accounting talk about the curriculum and structure of the program and how it can help students advance in their careers. Learn more at:
http://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/ac...

Video Transcript:

[Jake]
I think the reason that the students enroll in this program is that they want to begin to speak the language of business. Many of them have some background in business. Many of them don’t. And what this does is it allows them to swan dive into the business field in a very intensive but very direct way.

[Sean]
Some are here because they’ve never taken business before and they need to get the credits to get to that CPA level, and that’s where they're going. And some people are here, like myself, to just kind of refresh and rekindle, areas that we hadn't touched in about maybe five to seven or eight years of education and/or practical work experience.

[Summer]
I decided that, after talking with my CFO and my finance director, that I wanted to go ahead and get my CPA, so I could go ahead and get ahead in my company and just my career in general.

[Jake]
So students are offered two different approaches to the certificate program. There’s a full year course and then there’s a summer intensive course, and it turns out that the content of both courses is going to be fairly similar. The difference is going to be the speed through which we cover that content.

[Sean]
It is at a fast pace, but you sort of move through from financial accounting into managerial accounting and then into auditing and tax.

[Jake]
The curriculum of the course is designed to prepare the students to take the CPA exam. So we give them the fundamental courses needed for that. There are three courses on financial accounting. So we're going to cover topics like revenue recognition, the matching principle, financial statements and how to read and create financial statements – and all of the details that go into those. The course you take after the financial accounting classes is auditing. So, the audit course is designed to help external users verify and validate financial statements. The course after that is going to be cost accounting, which is, it's also accounting, but it's accounting for internal managers.

[Summer]
There is no way I would have learned this on my own; I wouldn’t have had the motivation to be able to do it.

[Jake]
So the level of faculty in the certificate program is outstanding. Looking across the faculty, you see professors who have won national research awards in accounting. You see other faculty who have won school-wide teaching awards.

[Sean]
The faculty was strong. I think they're, the nice part about the students typically in this class is they're a bit older, so they're a bit more professional. So I think the students and the teacher kind of can relate on different subjects.

[Jake]
So as part of the course, they have an alumni career panel where they bring back previous graduates of this course and talk about the things that it helped them with and try to help them to move into new careers. We’ve often seen accounting firms who come to recruit specifically from this course. And so, the nice part about the course is it’s not just about learning a science, it’s about using the science which is going to be applied in a career. And we definitely see students who make that happen – who move from one career into an accounting career, and the mechanism through which they do it is this course.

[Summer]
Well it’s actually already helped tremendously. Just because I have been in this course and learning what I have been learning, I have already received a promotion and a couple of pretty substantial raises.

[Jake]
I think this course definitely can affect a person’s resume, both directly by showing that they completed graduate level courses in a very rigorous field at an excellent institution but also indirectly in a sense that it allows them to prepare for the CPA exam, and that CPA is a golden key.