I hope everyone is faring well through this unprecedented time in our history. Here at DePaul University and the School of Accountancy & MIS, the spring quarter was quite challenging. All of our full-time and adjunct faculty members had to convert their classes to 100% online and remote delivery with only about two weeks’ notice. I’m pleased to report that all of the faculty and staff of the school and college stepped up for our students and did an outstanding job. Prioritizing safety, we offered our courses online and student services remotely again this fall. Student feedback on our response to the situation was extremely positive for both our online learning and remote student support services.
We continue to move forward with providing students with invaluable educational experiences and sought-after career skills. We have been working diligently over the last few years to integrate data analytics into our curriculum as part of our strategy to offer state-of-the art accounting programs. Our faculty has created cases and data sets for use in our courses to provide students with real-world experience using various tools, including Excel, Tableau and IDEA. I’m pleased to share our progress and successes with this endeavor in this issue’s feature story.
This autumn we welcomed three new tenure-track faculty members to the school: Kirsten Fanning, Bright (Yue) Hong, and Jeff Ng. Kirsten joins us from Villanova University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her PhD in accounting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Bright earned her PhD in accounting, with a master’s in accounting, from Emory University. For the last academic year, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Iowa. Jeff received his Master of Science in Accountancy from DePaul and went on earn his MBA and PhD in accounting from the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The faculty and the staff of the school remain dedicated and prepared to respond to the needs of our students, recruiters, alumni and friends. Feel free to contact us anytime. Our thoughts are with you and your families. We hope that you all remain safe and healthy.
Ray Whittington
Professor and Director
School of Accountancy & MIS