What Do Accounting Students Need the Most?

What do accounting students need the most? Well, I'll let you watch the video and see. Too often, new hires in public accounting firms know about advanced topics, but that's not all they need.
0:00 Introduction
1:00 Lost in the beginning
2:06 Understand the basics
2:35 Case studies
2:56 Students not understanding the basics
3:27 T accounts
4:45 Valuable new employees
5:02 Embarrassed new employees
6:00 The lights come on
6:50 Internship training
7:25 Basic accounting concepts
#CPAHallTalk

[@Freesoul72]

I started to learn accounting when I was turning to 50 years old two year ago in Finland in Finnish. All basic things. Thanks you for the terms in English I am learning here.

[@garyrosencpa]

Yes, I agree. When I went through school in 2008, the faculty at my school understood the need for students to have a solid grounding in the basics. And so they taught us that way. It was a big assignment where we had to manually perform the entire accounting cycle from beginning to end with paper and pencil for a fictitious company using journal entries. We had this assignment at the end of the intro to financial accounting class and then again repeated it at the beginning of the intermediate level financial accounting class. It stretched over both semesters. Once you have this solid understanding of debits and credits and which accounts they increase and which ones they decrease and how it all fits together to create the financial statements, you can pretty much take your career in any direction you want and learn any other type of accounting or software you want.

[@CPAHallTalk]

Perfect, Gary. This is exactly what is needed. Few colleges do this. Thanks for sharing.

[@davidhowell532]

So true! My embarrassing moment was when I realized I didn’t know how to use an adding machine. 😂

[@CPAHallTalk]

That’s funny, David. But who would think to teach a college student how to use one?