After long journey to interview some people, for this time our personage is Claire Schulte. She is an audit manager with Deloitte & Touche, currently on a two-year assignment in London. She has been with the firm since 1994, when she graduated from the University of Portland as valedictorian with a double major in accounting and finance.

How did you move from the Portland, Oregon office to the London office of D&T?

By sheer determination. My largest client in Portland was a life insurance company that recently “demutualized,” which means they went from being owned by policyholders to public ownership on the New York Stock Exchange. I let a Deloitte partner in Portland know that I would like an assignment overseas, and at an international conference, he came across a partner in the United Kingdom who was looking for someone with life insurance experience. My purpose here is to work with another insurance company that is undergoing the demutualization process. The office in London is Deloitte’s largest office in the world, and I’m working with clients operating in many different countries.

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For this interview, our personage is Darien Griffin. Just like the other personage, He works at big company too, at S.C. Johnson & Son in Racine, Wisconsin. S.C. Johnson is a leading maker of chemical specialty products for home, persoanl care, and insect control. Mr. Griffin is a 1991 graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and is in the executive MBA program at Marquette University.

How did you decide on accounting as a career?
Well, I liked numbers and I liked business. Originally, I was majoring in Actuarial sciance, but found it to be too focused on math theory.

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This is the second interview, after the first interview at this site. This time our personage is David Miniken. He is a senior auditor with Sweeeney Conrad, a Seattle-based CPA firm. Prior to joining Sweeney Conrad, Mr. Miniken held several accounting positions with Boeing, the giant aircraft company. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in accounting from the University of Washington, and an MBA from Seattle University.

How did you decide on accounting as a career?
I think it was my fourth major in college. I started out pre-med, then went to physical education, then forestry, and then business. Once I settled on business, then I chose what I thought would be the best route to employment.

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This is the first interview at this site, our personage is Rachel Woods. She is an auditor with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, a “Big 5″ accounting firm. She is a 1998 graduate of the University of Iowa with a major in accounting.

How did you decide on accounting as a career?
First of all, I grew up in a family that ran a small business –a convenience store and gas station. I was always interested in understanding the business beyond just handling the cash coming in the door. I thought that accounting would give me a broad and diverse background relating to the business world, and that it would open doors in finance or general management.

As a member of the audit staff, what is a typical engagement like for you?

When you first start an audit, you meet with the PricewaterhouseCoopers engagement team. You walk through who’s responsible for what tasks, and then you sit down individually with the audit senior, and he or she will describe the different areas that you’ll be working on. If you’re auditing the balance sheet, for example, then you would test to see if cash, accounts receivable, inventory, and so on are correct. We have audit programs that help us test these numbers, but others are judgment calls. Read more…