Business students’ visit offers first-hand exposure to (potentially) their future careers

“It’s one thing for employers to come to campus to talk with the students,” Assistant Professor of Accounting Rob Warren said last week. 

“It is quite another for students to go to potential employers and see them in action.”

That’s exactly the experience a group of Radford students got Nov. 15, when members of Beta Alpha Psi – the international society for accounting, finance and information systems majors – took a daylong trek to Roanoke to visit two of the types of businesses in which they might one day work: a local branch of the Internal Revenue Service and the accounting firm of Foti, Flynn, Lowen and Company, LLC.

“My goal was to take our Beta Alpha members, who constitute our best and brightest accounting, finance and information systems majors, out of Radford and expose them to real-world professionals in the workplace,” Warren explained. 

Several of those they met that day are Highlanders themselves: David Tingler ’97 is a partner at FFLC, and Chelsey Otey ’11 is its office manager, while Ingrid Diaz ’23 and Noah O’Dell ’20 are staff auditors there; Antonio Hernandez ’22 and Michael Dorman ’24 are newly hired IRS revenue officers. 

At FFLC, students toured the facility, got background on the firm and met with auditors, discussing the first-year work experience and the need to prepare for the CPA exam. They also talked about the potential advantages of being at a small accounting firm, such as having a greater variety of tasks, more responsibility at a quicker pace and maintaining a positive work-life balance. 

About 10 members of the IRS-CI and IRS Small Business/Self-Employment divisions described their day-to-day operations for the students and the duties of both a special agent and a revenue officer, as well as the 24-week educational program that special agents undergo through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. 

“There are plenty of opportunities for accounting majors in a wide variety of fields, including auditing, tax collection and investigations,” Warren said, adding that students also learned a crucial lesson from their exposure to the workplaces: “New graduates need to be able to work in teams and have excellent interpersonal skills.” 

Senior Lydia Frazier of Manassas, Virginia, is double-majoring in accounting and dance and is the president of Radford’s chapter of Beta Alpha Psi. Frazier, who has already been hired as a staff auditor for Ernst & Young, helped organize the trip.

“We had mostly accounting majors, and I know that not all of them were interested in going straight into public accounting at a CPA firm, so getting to see different kinds of career opportunities was really beneficial for them,” she said. 

“One of my favorite parts was connecting with recent graduates,” she explained, citing Diaz and Dorman as those she’d met earlier, as Radford students. “We talked to them and saw their experience fresh out of college, saw what their day-to-day looks like and what their workload is like – both at the IRS and at a CPA firm – and how they adjusted to the real world. It definitely made the experience full circle.

“I think the amount of opportunities that are out there was really beneficial to see,” Frazier added. “It’s not just one pathway; there are many different paths you could take.”