The Circle Game

The Circle Game
Chapter Activity Reunites Student and Teacher as Peers

By Simon Eskow

Sometimes you can’t get away from your past. Veteran accounting professor Thomas Boyd knows how that feels.

Last January, the then Queens Chapter president-elect sat down for an officer orientation when his past stared him in the face. There, sitting across the table, was Barry Doll, the incoming Manhattan/Bronx Chapter president, and a former student of Boyd’s from the 1960s.

“It was kind of interesting that he and I were coming in (as chapter presidents) at the same time. And it’s strange that he’s retired and I’m still working,” Boyd joked. “There’s something wrong with that.”

Boyd has been a professor of accounting at St. John’s University, in which capacity he has met, by his count, hundreds of students over the years. But Doll was one of Boyd’s first students, attending class at St. John’s downtown Brooklyn campus, which no longer exists. The two had seen each other at a few alumni functions in the years after Doll’s graduation in the late 1960s. Still, working closely with his former professor as a fellow chapter president gave Doll pause to think.

“Sitting at that presidents-elect orientation, I thought, ‘This completes a circle,’” Doll said. “I said to him, ‘It’s funny how life turns out, how we’re here sitting next to each other now as colleagues.’”

In the year since, Doll has kept in touch with Boyd, including his participation in career day for high school students at St. John’s campus in Queens. Other former students of his also attended the career day.

“There is definitely a sense of pride seeing these students,” Boyd said. “It’s really nice when you see your students succeed and do well. I’ve had that opportunity from time to time, after teaching 41 years.”

Doll entered St. John’s in 1965, when St. John’s maintained a campus on Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn, commuting to class from his home in Sheepshead Bay. Doll was only taking evening classes at first, but decided to go full time to finish earning his degree as soon as possible.

“That’s when I met him,” Doll said. “He was probably one of my best accounting teachers.”

Doll said his own experience as a teacher in a PricewaterhouseCoopers program made him understand the sense of pride in seeing students succeed in the profession.

Other New York State Society of CPAs members active in their chapters have had similar experiences. George Foundotos, a Suffolk Chapter government relations director, said he was reunited with one of his former professors at a chapter function.
“When he saw me, he announced to the group that now he really felt old, when a former student was now a colleague,” Foundotos said.