An Accounting & Finance Student's 5 Favourite Classes

In the past few weeks, I’ve written two blogs featuring my lovely roommate Melissa! We talked about her life as an Accounting & Finance student and also about her experience living with a roommate in downtown Toronto. Thankfully, she enjoys living with her current roommate (me)! I thought I would bug her for another interview where I asked her about her favourite classes that she’s taken so far.

AFA 708: Forensic Accounting and Internal Audit was a required class for Melissa, but she liked it as it was very different from her other required accounting classes. She said the class “was focused on fraud, fraud detection and prevention, and the techniques that management can use to prevent and avoid fraud.” In the class, Melissa worked on assignments where students were given case scenarios and had to figure out where things went wrong in terms of fraud and ways management could avoid it in the future. I just need to say that as a non-accounting major myself, this class seems really interesting!

Melissa said she liked this finance class because it focused more technically on Microsoft Excel than her other classes. She took this class in her fourth semester and already had the basics of Excel down. In AFF 420, she “got to make some cool dynamic Excel workbooks where we had a few different case scenarios. [She] created different toggles so if you picked one, it would change all the financial statements to see how it would affect the company across all financial statements.”

SOC 202: Popular Culture is a popular lower liberal elective among students at our university. Melissa describes it as “very forward thinking” and it talks about “a lot of topics that affect us today, such as social activism, the role celebrities play in our society and whether or not Canada has its own culture separate from American/Hollywood culture.” Her favourite part of the class was the discussion that was involved. Since she took it online, the discussion was done through online posts and she said “it was very interesting to see everyone’s point of view on these popular topics and engage in a conversation about it.” Melissa also had assignments that tied core course concepts to popular film and television shows. This is one class I wish I took, but haven’t gotten around to!

For one of her electives in first year, Melissa took ECN 340: The Economics of Human Behaviour. She enjoyed it because it was “about human behaviour from an economic perspective.” In the class, they discussed topics such as marriage and divorce. They evaluated how economics affects people’s spending on food, and how different income classes have different spending habits based on economic variables. If this class seems interesting to you but math isn’t really your thing, Melissa says not to worry, as it’s “not too ‘mathy’ and more principle-based.” This is one of the classes that convinced Melissa to pursue an Economics minor!

Melissa took AFA 200: Management Accounting at the beginning of her second year and found it very interesting because it was about the type of accounting that looks at costs from a management perspective. It’s all about how many units of a product a company needs to sell to break even or earn a certain amount of profit and determining whether or not a business can stay afloat. She found the course interesting because she liked “seeing the financials from management’s perspective.”

I asked Melissa for any advice she had for students when it comes to picking courses. She recommends that if you find yourselves liking a specific type of class while looking for electives, see if there’s a minor offered for it. That’s how she got into her Economics minor — she had already taken some of the required classes and thought she would finish with a minor. It’s not something that you need to decide on right away. I decided to pursue my English minor going into my third year. Melissa also suggests playing around with your elective choices because “this is your opportunity to explore different areas while you have the chance. You never know where you might find another side passion.”

As roommates, I often informally hear about Melissa’s experiences in her classes, but this was a nice way for me to learn more about her degree! I definitely echo Melissa’s advice in trying out a range of classes. Not to bring us all back to 2011, but you only live once—YOLO!

Thumbnail Image Source: Unsplash (external link, opens in new window)