Andrew DiLeo (BUS ’16, MSAA ’17)
ANDREW DILEO (BUS ’16, MSAA ’17) is a dual degree recipient (Double Demon) working for BDO as an auditor this fall. He was an active Beta Alpha Psi member and was the DePaul recipient of the Federation of Schools of Accountancy Student of the Year Award. In addition to his studies at DePaul, he was a graduate assistant at the business college, where he worked extensively with international students and assisting professors in research and class support.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TRANSFER TO DEPAUL?
I spent two years at Oakton Community College taking a variety of courses and decided that I was going to transfer to a major university. I wanted to study accounting, but what made me decide on DePaul was the small classroom sizes. I wanted to feel like I wasn’t going to be just another name on the roster. DePaul gave me the opportunity to have a one-on-one relationship with my professors and build lasting relationships that I would have for the rest of my career.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO GET YOUR MSAA?
As an accounting student in my junior year, I started thinking about how I was going to earn extra hours to sit for the CPA exam. At the same time in class, I was introduced to auditing, fraud [detection] and data analytics. Two of the values that I hold most dear are honesty and integrity. These are important values to have while studying fraud. Finding fraud is something that’s crucial to the economy, as well as for keeping people honest, and [this realization] is what drove that [lesson] home for me. I realized that this was the career that I wanted to go into and that these are skills I will be able to take with me for the rest of my life.
HOW HAS DEPAUL DEVELOPED YOUR CAREER?
DePaul has been instrumental in my professional and personal development. I had the opportunity to work with professors who have worked in the accounting industry for decades as well as those who have mastered their craft in an academic setting. Never had I taken a series of classes with a sequence of amazing professors one after another. It was a great learning experience with real-life applications. I have been able to apply things I have learned in internships and will be able to use my learnings in my future career. Having an internship was definitely a big driver in the development of my skills and understanding the flow of an accounting cycle, or how every business needs an accountant. In addition, the students at DePaul were some of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my entire life, and being around those people makes you a smarter person and gives you the drive to be a better accounting professional.