Right on Track

Right on Track
First-Year CPA Knows Exactly Where She’s Going

Margarita Rodriguez is a member of that group of highly motivated, special individuals who, when you meet them, can make the rest of us—this author included—suddenly feel very lazy.

Her last year in high school, she debated between a career in accounting and civil engineering. It’s safe to say her mother’s position with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance probably had something to do with her ultimate decision, and from that point on Margarita hasn’t looked back.

A graduate of Pace University, she received her bachelor’s in business administration and master’s in business administration degrees in only five years. In college, she belonged to the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting (ALPFA), as well as to two academic accounting honor societies, Beta Gamma Sigma and Beta Alpha Psi, where she sat on the executive board. She also held a tax internship with Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, working 25 hours a week, three days a week, for two and a half years. From January to April, this workload jumped to 40 hours a week.

Today, Margarita is a first-year CPA, working in the audit practice of another Big Four firm, Ernst & Young LLP.

Given the fast track that Margarita has been on for the last several years, it’d be easy to think that she is a tireless workaholic who never gets up from her desk. Well, there’s probably no denying the workaholic label, but the thing she likes most about the accounting profession may surprise you.

“What I enjoy most about being a CPA is meeting new people,” Margarita says.

The antiquated image of the backroom, numbers-crunching CPA would suggest that accounting isn’t exactly a profession in which there is much occasion to come across new faces, but usually, quite the opposite is true.

In Margarita’s case, she’s gotten to know her clients’ controllers, CFOs and even a CEO. And of course, she’s become close with the members of her audit team, going out to lunch and attending networking events with them after work.

While she enjoys the social component of her team’s interaction, Margarita says that having good relations is also central to their mission.

“It’s very important, because you spend so much time with them that if you don’t work well with them, you won’t succeed,” she explained.

Because she is with a big firm, Margarita also appreciates other opportunities outside of the office that she might not otherwise experience.

“For me, it’s not just work. If it were just work, I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much,” she said. “So I get involved with other activities at Ernst and Young, and that allows me to meet people from different groups, people who don’t even do financial services.”

These activities include her membership in Ernst & Young’s ALPFA chapter and student recruitment, in which she attends career fairs on behalf of the firm to help students secure internships and full-time jobs.

Whenever she goes to these networking events for students, Margarita always reminds them of one key benefit to becoming a CPA.

“With an accounting major, you have a lot of choices in terms of what you can do,” Margarita says. “A lot of people think it’s mainly tax. Like my family—with the exception of my mother—I’m not sure they know what I do. But there’s definitely more than one field you can go into.”