Last week five University students flew to New York, viewed a Broadway play, dined with corporate executives and delivered a detailed presentation – all for the love of accounting. The students made up an accounting team selected to participate in the finals of xACT, a national competition designed to challenge the best and brightest in college accounting. The team included Heidi Giles, accounting sophomore; Glenn Penton, finance sophomore; Wade Giles, finance junior; Mycah Perry, accounting senior and Stephanie Smith, accounting graduate student. Laura DeLaune, accounting instructor, served as the team’s faculty adviser. PricewaterhouseCoopers, an international accounting firm, hosts the annual event. Judges from PWC visit colleges across the country and selects the five best teams to compete in the finals. “The big thing was LSU had won the national competition the previous two years,” Perry said. “The competition was really stuff at LSU. In our minds, whoever wins at LSU, [was] going to the national competition.” Teams are judged based on the depth and quality of their presentation given in response to a predetermined accounting problem. The problem involved a fictitious country in the process of changing its accounting system. “We had to identify the problems they would face in the transition and propose ways to mitigate the risk,” Smith said. This year the judges visited dozens of colleges and viewed more than 400 presentations, selecting only five teams to travel to the national finals. The other four schools represented in the finals were Hampton University, Indiana University, New York University and Wake Forest University, who won the competition. At the finals, the teams were required to re-deliver their original presentations. “We presented the exact same presentation and we had a more intense question and answer session afterward,” Heidi Giles said. “We couldn’t change the content of the presentation, but our presentation skills were definitely a lot better.” Despite not placing first, team members described the trip as a good experience. “I loved it,” Perry said. “I had a great time and it was amazing from start to finish.”
—–Contact Daniel McBride at [email protected]