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G R E E T I N G S A L UMN I A N D F R I E N D S , This has been an exciting year for ACIS with positive initiatives employed to help ensure our students receive an excellent education, and that our faculty research be acknowledged for its excellence and impact in the leading journals in the field. We recruited additional well-qualified, talented faculty members to educate our students, and implemented curriculum advances. We have had a great year, and plan to move forward to make our Department even stronger and more successful. Allow me to describe some events occurring over the past year, with more details provided throughout this newsletter. We graduated 175 ACIS students in the past year consistent with our average over the past ten years. Our placement rate was over 93% by graduation with many students obtaining positions with the top firms in the world. We plan to do everything possible to facilitate continuation of student success. With that goal in mind, we developed a new required senior-level course “Accounting Analytics”, and feedback indicates this course is very popular among the students. This Accounting Analytics course is part of a broader ACIS Technology Initiative to ensure relevant technology is incorporated into every upper division and graduate ACIS course. As part of this overall initiative, we worked with KPMG to develop a new Accounting Analytics option in our Master’s program. While this option is available to any MACIS student, we enrolled our first cohort of KPMG-sponsored students this semester whose educational expenses are fully paid for by KPMG. One of the benefits of working with KPMG on our Accounting Analytics option is the state-of-the-art training our faculty received, which we are using as a springboard to incorporate more advanced analytics into our undergraduate and graduate courses. This initiative should help ensure our students enter the profession with the concepts, tools, and knowledge to be successful. We had another impressive year hiring well-qualified faculty to educate our students. Michelle Lowry joined us this semester after working in public accounting for seven years and then attaining her PhD at the University of Hong Kong. We also hired three new experienced assistant professors who will begin next year (Andrew Acito, PhD Iowa; Liang Tan, PhD Northwestern; and Marshall Vance, PhD Penn). At this writing, we also have offers outstanding to two excellent Professors of Practice. We welcome these new faculty members to our energized faculty team. One indicator of this increased energy and synergy is the excellent research productivity resulting in far more elite-level journal publications in the last calendar year than any previous year. Another external performance measure demonstrating our excellence is found in our Public Accounting Report rankings where our undergraduate and master’s programs are each ranked 21 st in the country with both ranked in the top 3 in the Northeast/ mid-Atlantic region. We are pleased with the achievements of our students and overall department. We greatly appreciate support provided by our alumni and friends, which enables achievement of expanded goals in the face of declining state support. Thank you for all your help and support. Best wishes for a very happy holiday season for you and your families. Go Hokies!

G r e e t i n g s

Accounting Research Conference Hike

(from left to right) TIm Bauer (University of Waterloo), Ben Commerford (University of Kentucky), Lauren Reid (Wake Forest University), Jim Naughton (Northwestern University), Delia Valentine (Virginia Tech, Ph.D. student), Amanda Convery (University of Delaware), Sarah Stein (Virginia Tech, faculty), Sean Hillison (Virginia Tech, faculty), and Matt Cobabe (Virginai Tech, faculty).

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Greetings Football Player/ACIS Major Beta Alpha Psi

Michelle Lowry Joins Faculty PCAOB Scholarship Recipient Professorship/Fellowships Announced ACIS Curriculum Changes ACIS Offers Winter Session Courses Inaugural Accounting Research Conference Thanks to Our Donors Making a Donation Virginia Accounting & Auditing Conference

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