Two Collins College of Business alums are working to change the perception of accounting.
Hannah Bostian graduated from UTulsa with an accounting degree in 2019.
“The biggest misconception is that accounting is math,” she said. “It isn’t. Accounting is a language—the language of recording a business’s history through its financial transactions. What you learn when getting an accounting degree is the vocabulary and rules of that language.”
However, she added, like any language, it only makes sense when you are immersed in it. “Your first few years of working in accounting will help you become fluent.”
Bostian, who is a business systems analyst at Koch Engineered Solutions, initially didn’t want to go into accounting. Her mom is an accountant, she said, and she thought she would be surrounded by number-crunchers.
But then a UTulsa professor gave her some advice.
“They said that when picking your major and your career, you should stick close to the people you like being around,” Bostian recalled. “You will spend about 90,000 hours of your life in your career, and the No. 1 thing that makes it enjoyable is being around people you like. When selecting your major, you should like the professors that teach it and the students who take it. At the time, I was an engineering student taking some business electives, and I quickly realized that I had made friends in the business classes. I decided to follow my friends.”
Gabby Galiger also graduated in 2019 with an accounting and finance double major from UTulsa.
She said accounting is a great opportunity to really understand a company’s business. “In my experience, accounting provides exposure to a lot of different areas of a business such as IT, credit, and sales,” she said. “At my company, many people start in accounting but find their passion might be in a different part of the business. Accounting is also a great major because almost every company in every business sector needs accountants.”
Galiger said UTulsa fostered her sense of curiosity and desire to fully understand things.
“It was also a great environment to get comfortable with not only asking questions but asking for help,” she added. “There are people at Tulsa who want to teach you and help you improve – and hopefully that’s the case at a workplace too.”
Galiger, a senior accounting analyst at Flint Hills Resources, said her job can be very project-based at times and is different every single day.
“It requires that I come up with and determine how I will spend my time to meet all of my reporting deadlines while moving my larger projects forward. Tulsa helped me with this skillset as well by providing a chance to practice balancing and prioritizing various class assignments along with student organization responsibilities.”
The University of Tulsa’s Collins College of Business holds accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a distinction earned by less than 5% of business schools worldwide, signifying a commitment to excellence in business education.