Accounting Archives - PhD Project Stories

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…

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…

Mentor of Mentors

Dr. Carolyn Callahan, former Dean of the College of Business at the University of Louisville, and former KPMG Distinguished Professor of Accounting and Director of the School of Accountancy at the University of Memphis, was the first African-American woman to earn tenure in accounting at a doctoral-granting university. One of the active participants in The PhD Project’s formation,…

Two Meetings

At a tense meeting one day in the early 1990s at a large, heavily white university, a student watched in silent respect and admiration as his mentor—a senior African- American faculty leader—stood up to academic ignorance and prejudice and stared it down. The student saw—perhaps for the first time—that it was possible for an African-American…

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…

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…

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…

Eleventh Hour Challenge

Professor Nicole Thorne Jenkins doesn’t just help her students write their own success stories. She then puts them to work—for her. Dr. Jenkins invested her own time, energy, and commitment into a student who was retaking the introductory accounting course after failing it with another instructor. “I encouraged her when she was discouraged. She came…

Balancing

At dinnertime as a child, Maria Sanchez took it for granted that her mother and father would join her around the table virtually every evening to share the day’s experiences. Most summers, one or both parents would be off, and the family would depart for lengthy, often exciting vacations. Before long, the young girl realized…

Committee Decision

Accepted by nine universities that were bidding competitively for her, Dr. Lynette Wood put the difficult choice of which offer to accept into the hands of a committee. A family committee. “My husband and children were fully involved in my search. Some schools were very prestigious, but the family said, ‘No way,’” she recalls. Dr. Wood…