Left to right: Mohammed Manzoor, Iqra Ansari, Emily Kaiser and Abdul Feroz were the team that took home first place.
Twenty-four DePaul business students took part in the annual Ledger & Quill case competition, hosted by the School of Accountancy & MIS, in October 2021. Assistant Professor Christine Gimbar administered the case, which involved a lease issue where a company that operates multiple gas stations decides to abandon a fuel pump. This required the students to research the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP for short, which are known as the rules and regulations for accounting.
“The students really had to dig into the accounting standards; there really is no absolute answer,” says Gimbar. “When it comes down to it, there are a lot of standards that are unclear, so what they had to do was take what their interpretation of the situation was and apply the standards.”
Seven teams presented at the Loop Campus in front of a panel of judges from the L&Q board, which included Dan Levenson, partner at RSM, and Jim Robbs, managing partner at Sassetti. The students from the top team were Abdul Feroz, Iqra Ansari, Mohammed Manzoor and Emily Kaiser.
“What I enjoyed most about this experience was working with friends to develop a solution to a challenging task,” shares Feroz, a returning case competition participant. “Though we have all been in the same accounting class for almost four years, this was a unique challenge that really required us all to think together and offer individual input. It was a challenge unlike any other that was fun to take on with good friends.”
“This competition was a great opportunity to apply topics I have learned in the classroom to real-world scenarios,” says Kaiser. “Some key skills I have gained from this experience were teamwork, problem-solving, time management and critical thinking.”
The top two teams received L&Q awards for their efforts, with the first-place team earning scholarships of $600 per student and the second-place team receiving scholarships of $500 per student.
By Mitchel Lister