1. Course

What is accounting?

The most fundamental thing every accounting student will learn is how to prepare a financial statement. That is the foundation of the course. Throughout the 4 years you’ll learn more about the accounting laws and the meaning behind the numbers on a financial statement so that you can help companies make decisions in the future. Accounting students also learn about the ethics and the code of conduct for Accountants to ensure investors are not misled by false information. Overall, you can see accounting students go into auditing, taxation, risk assurance, finance and many others.

 

2. Decision Making

How did you become interested in accounting?

I’ve always liked working with numbers since secondary school. As such, I realized I wouldn’t mind a job which involves a lot of numbers. Also, the opportunities available to accounting students are endless as accounting students can go into finance as well, apart from the usual auditing and accounting. So even if I ended up not liking accounting, I could go into the finance sector or into the business world which were options I didn’t mind pursuing. I’ve also heard people say how Accountants generally earn high salaries and their jobs are stable as well which were enticing to me back then.

 

How has your perception of accounting changed since you started Uni?

Before I started Uni, I thought accounting would just be about adding numbers up and would have a lot of hard math but the course is mostly about understanding the meaning behind what the numbers mean to a company. The math part of accounting is relatively simple compared to what I did in JC.

 

Will AI take over the accounting industry?

I think one area AI probably would take over in the years to come would be bookkeeping. It’s repetitive and very standardized. It’s the data collection part of the industry. But I believe it’s hard for AI to take over the accounting industry completely. To me, decisions made by AI would be more theory based whereas analyzing data and making decisions is a job for humans. Moreover, many might think that Accountants just sit at a corner and do their thing but it’s much more than that. They have to build relations with investors and other stakeholders in order to attract clients and that’s not something AI can do. Hence, although it’s possible that AI can take over some of the more repetitive jobs in the accounting industry, it is difficult for it to take over the entire industry so there’s always going be something for accounting graduates to do.

 

3. Teaching Curriculum

How often do you have school?

For this semester, I go to school 3 times a week, where my general mods take up one day of school. My general modules this sem are quantitative reasoning, which involves drawing conclusions from data and to describe the reasoning process, and this other module on understanding the history of Chinese Singaporeans.

 

What modules are offered at NUS Accountancy?

Currently, I’m in Year 1. Since NUS Acc is part of the business school, we do both business mods and accounting mods for the first 2 years.

Personally, business mods seemed intangible and boring at first but now that I look back, I have learnt some important stuff from doing these mods. The biz mods I’ve taken so far include Business Law, Marketing, Effective Communication for Leaders, etc. Now I am learning about Organisational Behavior and I honestly find it quite intriguing learning about how people behave in an organization. In the effective communication module, we learned how to communicate as leaders and how to give better presentations as well.

NUS BBA and BBA(Acc) curriculum from nus.edu.sg
There’s also the Data Analytics mod, where you learn how to make decisions using Excel. It is very sought after by almost all accounting firms and other employers so it is good to have it in your portfolio. Everyone finds it difficult and it is one of the hardest business mods but we all know that we have to take it.

For accounting mods, what I have done so far in the first semester are the basics such as bookkeeping and preparation of financial statements. Currently in Sem 2, I’m doing corporate accounting and after this I’ll be doing managerial accounting. With the foundation already laid out in Sem 1, now we are learning how to deal with practical issues pertaining to the preparation of financial statements in accordance to IFRS. This mod requires you to critically analyse every situation to choose the best financial reporting method as there are many factors to consider. For example, how to deal with warranties, when you should recognize certain revenues and factoring in possibilities such as customers returning items in the future and basically just dealing with more practical scenarios.

Apart from all this, we also have to take general mods. Every uni student has to take this except maybe for faculties like medicine, law and dentistry. The modules are centred around 5 basic principles, human culture, asking questions, quantitative reasoning, Singapore studies and thinking and expression. Personally, I find my general mods really boring and feel that they are a waste of my time. So, I don’t really choose general mods based on interest. I go for general mods which have the least commitment i.e. no exams.

 

How is the workload at NUS Accountancy?

When people say uni is easier, they’re lying. Now, I’m doing business mods which are supposed to be quite chill but it can get intense because there are so many projects involved. You must always be on the ball. You can’t be like “I’ll wait till Week 7 to start studying”, even though everyone does that same mistake LOL. In Sec School and JC, we might be used to putting work off till the last minute but that won’t be feasible in uni.

If you come to business school, there will always be something for you to do. For other faculties, there may be one or two projects a semester but for biz, it can go up to 7 or 8. Currently, since I’m in Year 1, I’m taking both business and accounting mods and as such, all my mods have projects. But the workload differs.

“Business mods tend to have more group projects than my accounting mods.”

 

What are your projects at uni like?

For one accounting project, for example, we had to kind of “audit” a company with the given case study. We were asked to see if they were abiding by the financial reporting standards. It’s quite hard because you have to google all the laws and it doesn’t just stop there. You have to see if there are any updated articles regarding changes in the system and what not.

Business projects definitely involve more group work. From my observation, what I can tell is that accounting projects are graded by content and reasoning skills whereas biz projects tend to be graded by their “fluff” and the students’ presentation skills.

 

What skills have you picked up at school so far?

Presentation skills

In Sem 1, I took the ‘effective communication for leaders’ module, where we had lots of practice presenting in front of others and also picked up many skills like hand movements, varying of tone etc. I think I’m way better at presenting in front of a large group of people now. I still remember my first presentation in Sem 1 where I was practising a lot at home before my presentation. Now, I’ve been moving away from memorisation and trying to improvise based on key points so that I sound more natural instead.

 

Business vs Accounting?

Business is more for people who like to work in groups and like to communicate with people. You need to be someone who is able to put yourself out there. Business would teach you how to communicate with people so don’t worry if you’re not a talker. What’s important is that you are someone who likes talking to people because business is going to be all about communication. If not business can be very dreadful and very intimidating. Oh and the very intense class participation.

Accounting, on the other hand, is very technical. You need to be able to map different laws and regulations out in your brain and need to be able to apply your knowledge to whatever scenario that is given to you. If you’re someone who likes to pay attention to technicalities and all that, you would be a great fit. Accounting involves way less talking. You can get by school by doing things by yourself but that won’t be possible in business.

 

4. Career Prospects

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Before I graduate, I want to know which part of the finance sector interests me the most. With an accounting degree, your options are not limited to accounting and auditing. You qualify for a lot of the jobs in the finance sector. So I’ll try to go through internships and hopefully find where my interest lies.

 

Do you think accounting students can compete with business students when it comes to finance jobs i.e. other than accounting and auditing jobs?

At NUS, accounting students can take up another specialisation of their choice on top of accounting in their 4th year. Business students on the other hand can choose 2 specialisations to pursue over the 4 years. These specialisations are available to both business and accounting students. If accounting students choose finance as their specialisation they would probably be able to compete at the same level as business students. Actually, accounting students might have an edge because their accounting knowledge can help them better understand the numbers at their finance job.

 

Who should do Accounting?

From what I’ve heard, quite a number of people drop accounting after a while. Many choose it because it is a professional degree. But after a while, people realize they can’t do it or that it’s too hard. For me at least I knew I liked numbers.

“Accountancy being a professional degree shouldn’t be the only reason why you want to do it.“

When choosing your course, you must really do something that you like. Or at least you must like some aspects of it and be willing to spend your time to try it out. It is a very big decision. Uni isn’t the same as JC where you just go with the flow because your time in uni will go by fast and it gets very real. You have to decide for yourself which path you wanna take in life.