Honors Theses

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Accountancy

First Advisor

Victoria Dickinson

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

I completed an internship in the summer of 2017 with the same company, so I have a fairly concrete concept of what my full-time role will entail, specifically which skills will be helpful to me on the job. One of my cases during the summer internship involved determining the impact of a city's fiscal policies and resource allocation on city departmental performances to inform future budgetary decisions. I was able to locate the city's budget documents (usually between 100 and 200 pages) and financial statements and quickly find the numbers my team needed since I was familiar with the format of governmental financial statements and adept at finding and interpreting the figures within them. Correlating the revenue and expenditure numbers to the corresponding budget categories and broader budgetary objectives was not an intimidating task as I had completed similar analyses before in my accounting coursework. After locating and extracting the relevant data, I completed many analyses using Excel- some of which I had performed before in Dr. Dickinson's class. The new calculations I needed to learn were easy to pick up because I was familiar with most of Excel's features and deft in executing complex commands. Though this is only one example, the advanced Excel skills and comfortability with dissecting large financial documents that I developed in Dr. Dickinson's class were critical to my performance in my internship and undoubtedly contributed to my positive performance reviews and receipt of a return offer at the end of the summer.

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