Satiprasad Bandyopadhyay has been teaching accounting for 20 years. As
a professor, he also does research focused on capital markets, analysts' forecasts,
and oil and gas accounting.
Bandyopadhyay began his career working at an accounting job in India. When
he earned his MBA, he chose to specialize in accounting, and then went on
to earn a PhD in business administration at an American university.
What drew him to accounting? "I like accounting," he says. "I went to the
MBA school in India and it may have had something to do with the professor...
He made things interesting."
Bandyopadhyay says the secret to succeeding in accounting is simple: "Hard
work, I would say. Our program is quite rigorous, so one must be prepared
to work. You must be interested in accounting issues and must work hard."
Accounting scandals have dominated the front pages of newspapers in recent
years. But the profession is still going strong. "There were some accounting
failures, some auditing failures and so on, [but] I think by and large that
has not touched the general body of accounting," says Bandyopadhyay. "I think
the image is still good and there is still a lot of demand for positions in
our program."
The scandals of recent years have focused attention on the issue of ethics
in accounting. But accounting students have long studied ethics as a part
of their training to become accountants.
"Ethics has been around for as long as I can remember," says Bandyopadhyay.
Tarsha Jacobs is an external auditor. She's hired on a long-term basis
by nonprofit agencies and government bodies.
"My first exposure to accounting was in high school," says Jacobs. "I took
an accounting course and I really loved it. I was always really strong in
math and really loved to work with complex equations.
"Those kinds of people are well-suited because accounting involves problem-solving
and it's something systematic -- you have to do steps one, two and three before
you get to four," Jacobs adds. "It's structured and there's a system to it."
Jacobs says future accountants will find growing opportunities in forensic
accounting, because fraud is such a hot topic.
"I do think that fraud [detection] is definitely one of the areas that
has been growing over the years and it's going to continue to be something
that's required a lot," she says. "Maybe another [area of demand] is people
who are experienced in Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), because of recent accounting
situations that have required more expertise with internal controls."
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act was named after the men who drafted it: Senator
Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley. The Act is supposed to protect
investors. It does this by improving the way corporate financial reports are
done to make them more accurate and reliable.