I’m currently a sophomore at a state school (kennesaw state university) with a 3.3 GPA and I’m going for a degree in accounting. I remember reading in one of the threads on here that an accounting degree doesn’t mean much until you get a CPA license or certification (not really sure the difference) and most of the people I read about on here are going to much better schools than mine so my degree must be worth even less.
I’m scared that I’m gonna be stuck in food service/retail forever since for the CPA qualifications (least for Georgia) require 2000+ hours of work under an active CPA and which means “Need CPA license to get experience, but need experience to get CPA license”.
NOTE #1: I’m not mocking food service/retail, I’m just wanting more of an “office job”.
NOTE #2: I’ve also read that a lot of people recommend internships and I have considered this but all the one’s I’ve applied to have been rejections or no response. Additionally, I’ve met with counselors at my school and they just gave me a website through them that lets you apply but I don’t qualify for majority of them because I’m not a junior.
Keep plugging along, get the degree and then sit for the CPA exam. You’ll find a firm to work for and get the needed experience. 2,000 hours is ~ one year full-time work.
I’m sure your school puts out plenty of successful accounting grads. If you haven’t already, join the student accounting group at your school. If you can get an internship great, but you’ll be fine without it. Just work hard to get your grades as high as possible.
One more thought on the internship; be sure to think outside the box and do more than all your classmates are doing. It will likely take much more than emailing out a resume. See if the Georgia Society of CPAs offers a student membership. Attend some meetings and introduce yourself to local CPAs. Show them that you’d love the opportunity to intern in the office (even for free). Ask them about their business, their experience, their likes & dislikes in the business, etc. You need to make it happen with your tenacity. It may be a little late to find a slot for tax season this year, but you never know.
Nobody expects you to have your CPA license or work experience to get your first full time job in accounting. Just try to be sure that your first full time job is either working for a CPA firm or working in a position where your boss is a CPA. In terms of internships, it is exceedingly rare to get one after sophomore year – most firms hire either juniors or more likely seniors who will be going on for a masters program.
The other thing to check is the education requirement for a CPA. Most states now require 150 credit hours which is about 30 more than a typical undergraduate degree.
Yea, I’m aware of the 150 credit hours requirement also but it wasn’t a huge concern because I figured if I was going to become a CPA, I would just get a master’s in accounting.
My main concern is that i’ll be stuck washing dishes with a master’s degree begging firms to hire me for me to get the experience I need to take the test. It just seems like at all the job listings I find through my school, monster, jobs.com, the newspaper, yellowpages, etc, say things like
“Minimum of 3 years payroll experience in a high volume payroll department”
“Must have 7+ to 10 Years of experience in bookkeeping or similar field”
“2-3 years experience in a public accounting firm”
All of which are for assistant payroll coordinator, junior accountant, and staff accountant.
I just look at those and I just don’t even know how I can compete. I’ve visited the counselors/advisers three times for my issue and I’ve been told that I just need to focus on graduating and then worry about it but I just hate that mentality.
Do not sit back and wait for a job to fall into your lap. Go meet CPAs in person and show the curiosity & tenacity about the profession to make them want to give you a shot. Most of us in public accounting get slammed during tax season and we need help. There are lots of data entry methods to input tax data without any underlying tax knowledge. If an accounting student knocked on my door today (which happens from time to time), I’d try to find them some work.
Job ads are what they are. FWIW my first CPA firm job came from answering an ad looking for more experience than I had.
Many acctg firms take college acctg majors as interns during tax season (now). You need to find acctg firms in your area and get one next year. If they like you, they’ll ask you back the following year and then, hopefully, an offer of full employment upon graduation. You’ll either work full-time while fulfilling the 150 hours or part time and zoom through the extra 30 credits. Then, with a job in hand, you study for the CPA exam. By the time you take the exam, you will have money in the bank and the hours under a CPA already fulfilled. My son is doing this now. He was a political science undergrad so he’s in his 2nd year of MAcc study - the extra year was to make up all undergrad acctg courses he never had.
I think you are confused You do NOT work experience before you take the test. You need the experience to get certified. My S recently started his career as a CPA. His timeline was:
-After junior year he did some one week programs with two accounting firms while working another non-accounting sumer job
-Graduated with his bachelors degree
-The summer between his undergrad and grad school he did an internship with an accounting firm
-Got his masters degree
-Studied for the CPA exam while getting his masters degree and the following summer (fortunately he passed the exam over the summer – if he didn’t he would have continued with the exam when he started work)
-Started work in the fall with an accounting firm
-Worked for a year and then applied for his CPA license
Firms come to colleges to recruit for entry level accounting positions and you should be able to find your first job in the profession this way. You can make an appointment with career services and talk to them.
Again, really very few sophomores will get meaningful internships. Most internships come the year between undergraduate and graduate school.
@arc918 and @pardullet I understand what you’re saying and i’m not meaning to ignore you but I just don’t think i have the confidence/outgoingness to be able to just walk in a random firm and be taken seriously. I mean like what exactly would I say? Like I’m assuming they would be very busy and just tell me to go away opposed to talk to me. I can’t imagine how to go about it, I’m assuming they require appointments and stuff. Sorry I’m just clueless about all this and I know I should just think like “I have nothing to lose,” but I can’t and just walking into a random building blind just makes me so nervous that I doubt I could do it.
@happy1 I wasn’t aware of that. I thought you had to meet all the qualifications and then you took the test. Can you put on your resume that you passed the test or firms only care if you’re certified or not?
To any of y’all, I understand that internships through my school is really only probable through my last two years so do y’all have any suggestions in the mean time to improve my chances? Or should i just focus on improving my GPA as much as possible and hope for the best?
You can do externships prior to your last two years. These are usually a couple of days long, most of the big firms have them, and it’s a good way to find out about what you want in public accounting.
This is absolutely correct. I passed all four parts of the CPA exam after only having two months of working at a public accounting firm (internship).
These are all things that you will get at most accounting programs. No work experience is required simply to take the exam, and when I was interviewing for jobs I never heard of any firms that actually expected the candidate to already have their CPA license. There’s even a running joke among some people in public accounting about how firms will hire anyone with a pulse and 150 credit hours. I don’t think it’s that lax but I’ve never run into a firm that expected campus recruits to have two years of work experience. In fact, in my experience the CPA license for accountants really comes into play for managers and above; my current firm actually requires all audit managers to have CPAs. But when I was an associate, many of my colleagues who were recruited out of college either had just finished the exam or were still taking parts of it.
Honestly, I don’t know too many people who just walked into random buildings and demanded jobs like that. I’m not knocking the advice since it definitely works for some people, but that’s not my style either and it’s not mandatory in order to get ahead in public accounting. Most of the regional and larger firms recruit on campus, and the many local firms recruit on at least the nearest college. Since you’re in college, it makes sense to reach out to your college’s career center as happy1 recommended to see which firms visit your school and when. You’re not limited to those, of course, but it’s a good start. (They can also help you with interviews, resumes, and other things)
-You absolutely do not need to meet the work requirements before taking the test. In fact, it would be highly unusual for anyone to have the work experience before they sit for the test.
-In terms of getting internships in the future, concentrating on your GPA is important. It doesn’t hurt to get involved in an activity or two on campus and take on a leadership position. And if you can get any job I’d talk to your career service department and get ideas from them as well.
-You can definitely put on a resume that you passed the CPA exam once you have done so (if you passed a couple of parts you can put that on as well as long as you are clear about what you have passed), you just cannot hold yourself out to be a CPA until you meet the requirements and get the actual license from the state.
Where do I find these and what exactly should I look for in one? Are they just worth the experience or can I also put them on my resume? Never even heard of them until now tbh which makes me think that the counselors at my school don’t deal with them.
There’s not really any activities I can do tbh, I usually have class or work in the evenings which is when majority of the activities take place. As for a job, I recently just left a dishwashing job after 1.5 years because I wanted to try retail.
Well that’s great to hear. Does it look good on a resume for employers to see that you’ve passed all or parts of the exam? Or they don’t really care?
Passing the CPA exam is very good. My firm and many of its peers will even give you a bonus just for doing it within a year of your start date (between $3000 and $5000, after tax). Again, if you’re being recruited out of college no one expects you to already have two years of public accounting experience.
I was in that boat too. It was hard since work hours and activity hours are usually the same for most college students. I finally got around it one semester by joining Beta Alpha Psi which at my school had two meeting dates per week (but you only had to go to one).
As far as externships go, if your career center really doesn’t mention them at all then one other tack you might take is to look up some firms that you’re interested in and go directly to their websites. The programs are usually called something like “summer leadership”. It’s up to you whether or not you want to put it on your resume; some people do when seeking internships because it perhaps demonstrates interest in the firm but it’s like attending a seminar/conference than a job/work experience. The firm is taking you to a nice hotel, feeding you, and trying to pitch why public accounting and that firm in particular is the best thing you can do with your life. I recommend it as a useful way to find out what you want to know, but in my opinion it’s perfectly OK for a candidate not to have any accounting experience prior to an internship.
I know this is going to sound really dumb but what exactly should I look for in a firm? According to the website for my business school, “leading accounting firms such as Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers,” which from what i’ve gathered includes the Big 4 which only recruits from top schools (for the most part). So i’m not really sure if that means they recruit from my school or just do it for appearances or if they only recruit the top %.
Not sure if there is a way to find out which firms actually recruit from my school or something to help in researching.
Also, for the 2000+ hours (1 year) experience requirement for the CPA, would interning under a CPA count towards it?
The way to find out which firms recruit at your firm is to talk to someone in career services and/or someone in your school’s accounting department. Nobody on this board will have that information.
There are tons of other international non-Big 4 firms as well as regional firms where you can get great experience if a Big 4 job doesn’t pan out. IMO you want to look for a firm that is reputable in your geographic area, that offers continuing education/training, and has a path for career development and growth. In most states now you can also meet your experience requirement by working for a CPA. I don’t think internship work experience counts (an intern will likely do lower level work compared to a staff accountant) but the rules are different from state to state so check with your state board – requirements are probably posted online. I’d stop worrying about meeting the experience requirement as there are many ways to do that if you get a job in the field.
Agreed. As I said earlier, no firm expects college students to have 2000 hours of experience in public accounting before they hire them. That’s just not a thing that happens. For the most part, campus hires get their experience after being hired, so honestly it’s not even worth thinking about when you’re still in college. I would pour all of my effort into getting good grades and then later the CPA exam.
That’s not true at all. I went to a mid-tier state school and we were recruited heavily by the Big Four as well as about two dozen other regional firms and a handful of single-office local firms. Different offices have different preferences/recruiting styles though; most of my experience was with the McLean/Tyson’s Corner offices in Virginia, but overall they really aren’t that prestige conscious in terms of undergraduate schools. (One of the guys on my engagement got his degree from Strayer, which is a for-profit school that isn’t exactly Harvard or Stanford).
I definitely recommend trying to get a list of which firms recruit at your school from your career center. I doubt that they would lie to you and tell you that the Big 4 recruit there when they really don’t. They might even be able to give you information about when firms visit as well as provide you with information about career fairs, “Meet the Firms” event, and other ways that you can network with employers. I would check also to see if your campus has a chapter of Beta Alpha Psi, the honors accounting fraternity. Even if you don’t have time to join, you can at least find out about the firms from talking to their faculty adviser at your college or even some of the other students who are members of the society. They’ll at least tell you which firms are holding events.
Kinda guessed as much but some people find websites with data that I didn’t even know existed so I figured it was worth asking. Didn’t want to assume and there be a website that showed regional/local firms employees’ college breakdown.
How exactly does one compare or find rankings for undergraduate business schools, I tried US News but they require a subscription to see past the top 5 and bloomberg only had my university ranked in part-time MBAs for 22nd, not ranked for undergrad? I’m well aware my university isn’t all that impressive but I’m curious as to whether its considered in the 25-50th or 50-75th percentile.
I recently have and email’d them about joining considering from their webpage, they don’t meet too often.
I suggest you join Beta Alpha Psi if you can and go to any meetings you can fit into your schedule. You can get more information about the accounting profession that way. It is also a good thing to have on your resume.
I don’t put much stock in the rankings but try googling “poets and quants” and either “undergraduate business school rankings” or “MBA”. That rating also shows you the Business Week and USNWR rankings.
Again, ranking are not terribly important IMO…make an appt. with career services to see what firms recruit there and how students from your college’s accounting program typically do in terms of job placement. And work on bringing up your GPA if possible.
Yea I know, its just something I wanted to research and I like to come on here or research the profession take a break from school or if I have nothing to do while on break at work.