 "Photo: Rebecca Gomez")
Accounting senior Edith Casco was introduced to the National Association of Black Accountants (NABA) the way many students in SOM have been this semester, by a short presentation from the members during her Cost Management class.
“They said that they were starting back up at UTD this semester because it didn’t work out last year,” Casco said.
Established almost 10 years ago in the School of Management NABA began as a networking tool for minority accounting and finance students, this year they are starting from scratch with membership, said NABA Vice President for Student Affairs and Accounting graduate student Ahmed Taha. A gap in student involvement from previous years is only now being filled with a small core group of students like Taha and with the help of Academic Bridge Program supervisor Cornelia McCowan.
One of McCowan’s APB students and vice president of NABA, Shannon Adamson, approached McCowan for help in getting the UTD chapter back off of the ground.
The UTD chapter has gone through many ups and downs in sustaining a presence on campus.
The problem, said McCowan, is that there was no structure in place to identify and vet successors to leadership positions when upperclassmen graduated. This lead to a stagnation and eventual deactivation of the chapter.
It was important to reactivate the UTD chapter because, said Taha, minority students need the opportunity to break out of stereotypes and discover a future in the field of accounting.
“Most students don’t dream of being an accountant,” Taha said, “It’s NABA’s job to change that.”
NABA will set an agenda this semester that includes bringing speakers in that are successful in the accounting world and will work with Dallas alumni to get events off the ground, said McCowan.
Speakers help spread the message of NABA, said Taha, because minority students can see people who look like them that have succeeded in accounting.
Taha said that diversity in the workplace also affects the ethics of the company. He said that had Enron had a greater diversity of people in their accounting department then it would have been less likely to be ruined by unethical “group think.”
“If everyone in a company thinks it’s all right to steal and an outsider comes in with a different opinion then the others may start to question how they are conducting business,” Taha said.
NABA will be sending a case management team to the Regional Student conference for NABA in October. The team will consist of four active members that will present a case in competition with other collegiate NABA chapters in the southwest region.
This will be the first time UTD has ever been represented at the case management competition.
Contact NABA through their Facebook page for membership details.
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