May 14, 2009
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Ada Sklyarsky took a less than direct path to Temple University Ambler and her B.A. in Accounting.
While Sklyarsky will graduate with an exemplary 3.95 average when she walks during Temple Commencement ceremonies on May 14, it was a “long, strange trip” as the song goes to get to the cap and gown and that trip begins in Nikolaev, Ukraine.
“A lot of our family had already moved to Philadelphia and California. Everyone could feel the collapse coming, so my parents made the choice to move and it was certainly the right one,” said Sklyarsky, who came to the U.S. at the age of 8. “I remember feeling kind of sad at first, but I adjusted quickly. Within the first three months, I was speaking English well enough to attend school.”
After completing high school, Sklyarsky took five years off — what she jokingly refers to as the “lost years” — to travel to various parts of the world, get married, and “read Dostoyevsky.”
“I was a teenager and I wanted to have fun, I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I knew at that point I wasn’t yet ready to put my best effort into college,” she said. “I traveled around the U.S., visited Austria, and returned to the Ukraine, where I met my husband Vasyl.”
Sklyarsky credits her husband for giving her the “kick” she needed to return to higher education.
“About a year after we were married, he pointedly asked me ‘What are you doing? You’re so smart, it’s a shame to waste all of this time.’” she said. “He was right. I registered at the Community College of Philadelphia a week later.”
That’s where Temple University Ambler comes in.
“I, of course, knew all about Temple — Temple is the Philadelphia school. I was encouraged to seek dual admission while at CCP,” she said. “I started looking at campuses and simply fell in love with Ambler — it’s so beautiful, you just love life when you’re here! I was also impressed that I could complete my degree at Ambler and transferred for my junior and senior year.”
Tracking her interest in accounting requires traveling with Sklyarsky back to Northeast High School.
“I was in a business charter while in high school and had two accounting classes. Straight away, I knew what I wanted to do,” she said. “I’m a big math person, I’m very analytical. With accounting, at the end of the day, I love how everything has to balance, everything has to equal out.”
Sklyarsky also took that passion for accounting outside of the classroom working at the accounting CPA firm Fishbein & Company, providing volunteer accounting tutoring to her fellow students, and volunteering for the Ambler Business Society and Beta Alpha Psi’s inaugural involvement in VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance); a program that she would coordinate in 2009. Through VITA, students and other campus volunteers provided free income tax assistance to low-to-moderate income families each Saturday from February through mid-April.
During VITA in 2009, 211 returns were filed and $224,597 in Federal and State refunds were claimed. Considering the cost of preparing the returns (which the IRS does), VITA at Ambler saved taxpayers a total of $267,096. The Ambler Business Society and Beta Alpha Psi were presented with Ambler’s first ever Community Service Award at the Student Leadership Banquet this year to recognize their efforts.
“I’ve been involved in volunteer work throughout my life and this was a wonderful way to use my skills to give back to the community,” she said. “It was an opportunity for everyone involved to gain the hands-on experience that is so valuable in our profession while helping individuals and families that needed our help. It was a terrific experience from beginning to end.”
Sklyarsky said her goal after graduating is to “get some experience in the real world before I lay out my life goals.”
“I would like to explore graduate school and I would also like to eventually teach,” she said. “For anyone interested in pursuing a career in accounting my best advice it to learn the basics. That will help you throughout your college career — you need a good foundation!” |
