During my third year in the Accounting and Financial Management (AFM) undergraduate program at The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF), I took on a research assistant (RA) role.
My love of accounting — especially the theories and reasoning behind how standards are designed — led me to pursue the RA opportunity. I was curious about the bigger questions behind the field, and I was looking for people who were interested in those questions too.
Through a Fellowship Program coffee chat in my second year, I was introduced to professor Tim Bauer and his mentorship program. Later, in my third year when the Program opened up research assistant (RA) roles to students, I had the chance to start working with him. My work so far has been in audit experimental research. I focused on several projects at the beginning, and my work involved literature reviews, data analysis and helping review and run experiments. Since RA work depends a lot on the type of research your supervisor does, the experience can look different for everyone, but for me it provided a broad view of what research actually involves.
One of the most valuable parts of this experience was professor Bauer’s mentorship style. He strongly believes that interest is the best teacher and he gave me a great deal of autonomy to explore the questions that genuinely interested me. Over time, my work expanded from supporting existing projects to proposing research ideas, pilot testing them and helping to think through experimental designs.
I used to see myself mainly as someone who received knowledge, but research gave me a different perspective on how knowledge is created. Working as an RA also helped me develop more of a research-oriented mindset: identifying a problem, finding a way to measure it, and asking how it might be solved or improved. More importantly, working closely with a faculty mentor made academia feel much more real and personal to me. It showed me that this could be a meaningful long-term path.
If I were speaking to a first-year SAF student, I would say that an accounting firm is a great option, but that it’s not the only path. Early in your career, the cost of trying different things is relatively low, so it is worth exploring broadly. At the same time, it is important not to just drift along or stay busy for the sake of being busy. As you take courses and complete co-op terms, keep asking yourself what motivates you, and what kind of people you want to work with in the future. The Fellowship Program gave me access to opportunities I might not have found on my own, and it helped me meet people who shaped how I think about my future.
