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Spring 2005 is Kristin Johnston’s final semester as an undergraduate student at Temple University Ambler.
Kristin decided not to take the easy road to her diploma. With a job already secured upon graduation, she’s still decided to go out in style.
“I need three classes to graduate, but as a transfer student I need two more on top of that to graduate with honors,” she said. “That’s been a goal of mine and I’m definitely going to do it.”
Kristin’s choices in courses this semester are no cakewalk either. It might only be February, but she’s already thinking about tax season.
“I’m taking Federal Taxes. As an Accounting major, I only have to take one auditing and one tax class,” she said. “I already got the auditing course out of the way but I waited to take the tax course. I was afraid people would start asking me to do their taxes.”
This semester, Kristin has two classes that she must take before Temple hands over her Accounting degree and sends her off into the real world.
Business Administration 361 — Business Policies is the capstone class for all Fox School of Business and Management majors.
“Every business student takes this course during their last semester. Basically you are learning about different companies and what you would do from a management standpoint when different situations arise,” she said. “You are using actual companies as examples, which I think is helpful when putting it into a real world perspective. The first two chapters so far have been a review of what managers are — what they do, what they plan for, and why they plan for it.”
The class is a wide assortment of students from every business major and when the class group project comes along, Kristin said, they’ll be put through their paces in their own particular fields.
“As an accounting major, I’ll be teamed up with human resources, marketing, and finance majors — different people that are going to give their different perspective to achieve a specific goal,” she said. “Accounting and finance will handle the numbers, marketing will look at who would be interested in your product or service, and human resources will focus on the business aspects. It will be interesting to see how all of these different skills mesh together.”
Her other required course is the Senior Seminar for Accounting Majors or as Kristin calls it, “the end of the line.”
“This is the culmination, a review of what you’ve learned in your major. One of the things we’ll be doing is reviewing pronouncements from the Financial Accounting Standards Board,” she said. “The pronouncements detail how to take care of different accounting situations. There is a standard for just about anything that you can think of.”
Over in General and Strategic Management, Kristin is letting her mouse do the talking in a course that focuses on software applications used in business. The focus so far has been on the use of Microsoft Excel.
“This is a course that I’m taking at the Main Campus. I am computer literate to a point, but I’ve never really learned Excel beyond copying and moving something,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll be able to learn how to work a spreadsheet to my advantage. It’s all about marketable skills.”
Back at Ambler, Kristin is answering to a higher authority.
“I’m taking a religion course on the New Testament as an elective — part of my goal to graduate with honors. We’re learning about the Gospels, which is interesting to me because it is a course that’s not taught from a strictly religious view,” she said. “I was raised Catholic while this is coming from an academic standpoint. It’s interesting to compare what I learned and what scholars believe.”
Outside of the classroom, Kristin is taking her position as president of Beta Alpha Psi very seriously as well.
“Other than dealing with the flu for two weeks, I spent a good amount of break trying to line up speakers for each of the Beta Alpha Psi meetings and I was pretty successful at it,” she said. “We have a partner from Grant Thornton coming in, an executive from GMAC, and my dad (Frank Johnston) is coming in — he’s an executive at Bank of America.”
Other lectures, Kristin said, will include a speaker from the American Red Cross who will be talking about the difference between public and private accounting. An executive from Ernst and Young will discuss making the transition from school to work while a manager from KPMG will talk about opportunities for interesting internships.
“You want fresh speakers and people from different firms each semester so we can give our Beta Alpha Psi members the broadest range of experiences. I try to have a speaker at each meeting — it keeps people coming to the meetings,” she said. “The important thing is finding out what members and people attending the meetings want to learn about. I think it’s very helpful to hear how an executive got to where they are now, the transition that they made from school to work, the steps that they had to take.”
Kristin also has a big step of her own coming up.
“I’m moving to Horsham, which is closer to campus, so that’s an added bonus. I’m moving into a condo with my dog and she is not going to like it — there’s no big yard for her to run around in,” she said. “Between homework and everything else, I have just about nothing packed. I don’t know how people manage it. Trying to figure out what I need to keep out because I might use it and what I’m not going to use and can be packed away, it’s hard to chose.”
Looks like that management course might come in handy sooner rather than later.
This is the fourth part of an “A Year in the Life” series featuring Kristin Johnston. Kristin, of Doylestown, was completing her Accounting degree at Amber at the time of the series.
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