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For Everyone That Comes After You

“I need to find a different way to achieve my goal,” veteran University of Texas accounting professor Dr. Michael Clement thought as he surveyed the classroom of his Accounting 380K course, Financial Statement Analysis. There was not another African-American in the room. One of the reasons Dr. Clement had leapt off a lucrative career path…

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Road Less Travelled

The littlest people in Dr. Charles W. Richardson’s Marketing Principles class at the business school of Clark Atlanta University sat on the floor in the back, quietly sipping from juice boxes and playing with sticker books. Occasionally, they bicker over who gets to hold the Barbie doll. They are the toddler sons and daughters of…

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Influencing Research Nationally

Sitting in the crowded meeting hall among 265 other hand- selected participants at the first PhD Project conference in December 1994 was a soon-to-be former financial analyst and small business development consultant from Philadelphia. Quinetta Roberson would go on to become one of the first PhD Project participants to make the successful leap to academia,…

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Mentorship: Pass it Along

When a young Miriam “Mimi” Stamps was still of an age when maternal influence is real and present, her mother advised her to become a teacher. The future Dr. Stamps promptly rejected that advice. It was a time when women were first beginning to think beyond the pre-feminist era stereotypes that had limited their career…

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Tough Love

The first-year PhD candidate, an African student with five small children under age six, was struggling greatly with the intense rigors of adjusting to doctoral study. His doctoral committee, meeting privately to review the unpromising record before it, gingerly turned its discussion to talk of the exit door. “Maybe,” one faculty member said reluctantly, “it…

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They Saw it in Him

Ex-Marine, now Colorado State University freshman, Andy Garcia looked in the mirror and saw a student. But when the academicians looked at him, they saw a future peer. “I was sitting in my counselor’s office, making the case for why I should be allowed to take an introductory accounting course out of sequence.  I pulled…

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Instant Family

Dr. Jones started on the road to his Ph.D. in 1993, after leaving his controller position at a prominent bank. At the first PhD Project Accounting Doctoral Students Association (DSA) meeting the next year, “I met so many people with the same experiences as me, it was like instant family. It was definitely a driving…

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Following His Heart

In 1983, Dr. J. Alberto Espinosa decided to get his Ph.D. in finance from Texas Tech University. After a year in the program, he realized that he was more interested in information systems than in finance. Because Ph.D. studies require such a strong time commitment, he decided to enter the work force to gain  more…

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Moment of Truth

“It’s a paper she can’t finish, or else she’s on overload from juggling her job and school,” thought newly-appointed accounting professor Dr. Veronda Willis when the young Hispanic woman hesitantly requested a private conference after class. But Dr. Willis was about to hear a very different story—one that would demand of her, in this first…

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Two A.M. Phone Call

Yancy Edwards knew when he began his Ph.D. studies that  he’d soon be working into the early morning hours frequently. What he didn’t anticipate was the 2:00 a.m. phone calls from an undergraduate struggling to make it through the college experience. “I tutored many students, and my undergraduates have always come to me for advice,…

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