Tips to Win Campus Friends: Educators Can Help You Find the Hires You Need
After nearly three decades in higher education, I had an epiphany--ivory-tower academics and real-world CPAs can benefit from a clearer understanding of the possibilities and limitations of on-campus classroom visits. Accordingly, here are tips with a twofold purpose: to encourage accounting students to become CPAs and to suggest to overworked practitioners from understaffed firms and companies how best to approach instructors about classroom visits. Professors understand that practitioners urgently need staff and want to reach out to students about the virtues of becoming a CPA. Your urgency to bring your presentation into the classroom, however, should not cause you to take us for granted or overlook our goals. Help instructors help you get the message across by enlisting us as allies. All relationships, personal or professional, require time and effort to nurture. These suggestions are not a comprehensive solution to stressed communications, but for a productive meeting of minds they're a good place to start. 1| Be aware that accounting professors can't always accommodate every firm. Besides CPA firms that want "face time" with our students, every organization that hires accounting majors wants an opportunity to interact with our best and brightest. Even though we love bringing professionals into the classroom, if we allowed everyone in, we'd never have time to teach. To be included, nurture a relationship with a professor and let him or her know you'd be happy to participate in a rotation with representatives from other firms. Explore venues for making faculty and student contacts; professional organizations, student clubs and internship interviews are excellent opportunities for networking with the future employee pool. 2| When you come to our campus, be businesslike. Even if it's casual Friday in the office, wearing khakis and polo shirts sends a mixed message to students. Some will think that's how all CPAs dress, while others will assume your attire signals your unimportance to your organization and discount your message. If you're good at telling jokes, by all means tell one. But students aren't impressed with so-so jokes or rambling tales, so consider the impression you wish to leave of your firm and the profession. Be prepared for every type of question--even inappropriate ones. If asked, be candid about the negatives of our profession; students will trust you for that. But be sure to tell them about the rewards and pleasures of your career. Great topics include how you decided to become an accountant, what your education/career path was like, what you wish you had known about accounting as a student and war stories about your work experiences. 3| Be open-minded in discussions with the faculty about the curriculum. Instructors need your input and will seek it out in designing the best curriculum for accounting majors. But we operate under academic constraints, have limited resources--in terms of both professors and courses--and try to make the wisest choices. As much as we may agree with your suggestions, sometimes we simply can't implement them. We're building a curriculum to fit a wide variety of accounting career paths--not just the path to a career in your organization. 4| Don't neglect superior students at average institutions. Understand that students choose a college for a wide variety of reasons. At age 18 (or even 25) some students do not know what they want to do with the rest of their lives. They may enroll in a college because the price is right, a scholarship was offered, the basketball team is good or a high-school sweetheart attends that school. …