Accounting

• Our alumni work in all areas of business: analysis, sales, consulting, management, logistics, accounting, information systems, sports, health care.  Many have gone on to graduate study in business, law, and other areas.
• The Department of Business offers a Major and a Minor in Business Administration, a Major and a Minor in Accounting, a Major in Finance, and a Major in Global Affairs and International Business.
• We have a close relationship with the Career Services Department.  Jointly we run a Corporate Internship program, through which students are placed in internships that are overseen by our faculty.
• Our professors have multiple, advanced degrees in management, accounting, finance, economics, taxation, and law.
• The top 20% of business juniors and seniors are qualified for membership in Sigma Beta Delta, the business honor society.

CAREERS:

Accounting majors are highly employable.  The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants says.

“CPAs and potential CPAs have a variety of career paths from which to choose. Within public accounting, you can work for any sized firm, ranging from a large, international CPA firm to a small local accounting practice. Within the firm, you can work in such areas as audit, tax and management consulting.

The same holds true in business and industry, where you can choose careers in companies of all sizes, working in diverse areas such as financial accounting and reporting, management accounting, financial analysis and treasury/cash management.

Within government, you can create a path to success at either the federal, state or local level. Non-profit organizations and education also offer many diverse opportunities.”

INTERNSHIPS:

Ave Maria University is fortunate to be connected to a strong, nationally-recognized network of business managers and CEOs who are looking for the skills and the virtues that characterize Ave Maria students.  We are very active in developing our students’ career potential, connecting them with suitable internships, and ensuring their success.

AFFILIATIONS:

The Business Honor Society Sigma Beta Delta has a chapter at Ave Maria University, to which the top twenty percent of juniors and seniors are admitted.

The accounting major will offer you many professional opportunities such as becoming a Certified Public Accountant (CPA); or working for a private firm (large or small) and perhaps becoming their Chief Financial Officer.  Every for profit and nonprofit organization needs accountants.  The accounting major will give you a strong background should you decide to go on to graduate school to earn a Master of Business Administration, Master of Public accountancy, or even a Doctorate.

Our students learn the basics in a way that is practical and oriented towards what is necessary to actually run a business.  Our students develop and sharpen their skills in communication and analysis, in working with others and working with numbers, in seeing the big picture and in drilling down to details.  Our students learn how to think – how to think better, more broadly, more flexibly – which is the best preparation for the changing world of business.

Our majors emphasize analytical thinking and tools: the intellectual equipment and critical skills needed to understand and excel in business and in most other human endeavors.  Ave Maria students have the unique fortune of building on a foundation of a liberal education, an education on the basic realities about God and the world, man and his relationship with God and nature.  Through our liberal arts curriculum, students learn that reality is coherent and intelligible and grow in the habit – in the essential business skill – of looking for patterns and seeing the sense in the apparent contradictions of the world that surrounds them.

The Business majors at Ave Maria aim to inspire students to become business leaders inspired by Christian ideals and governed by Christian ideas.  Relying on the Catholic faith lived intensely on campus and on the general intellectual formation of the Core Curriculum, what animates the program is the Catholic view of the human person, his nature, and his ultimate destiny.  The distinctive character of the program is its belief in the dignity of the human person, in the reality and importance of the common good, in subsidiarity and solidarity, in ownership as stewardship, and in responsibility for the environment.  Because students learn to value human beings for what they are, not for what utility they bring, they are able to serve the Church and their society loyally and generously.