Scholarship applications for the Washington CPA Foundation’s next award year went live on September 6th, and I was surprised to note that we had scholarship applications in progress that same day! If you’re new around here or were hiding in a cave last spring to escape tax season, the Foundation awarded over half a million dollars in scholarships for this academic year to 83 students. With 20 applications started less than a month into the application period (which ends February 17th) it seems that word has perhaps, finally, gotten out. Educators are referring more students, and many colleges have begun forwarding our scholarship emails to all declared accounting majors. As many of our scholarship winners are now leading their Beta Alpha Psi clubs, WSCPA has received generous invitations to attend meet the firms and other student events, which give us even more opportunities to encourage students to apply.

Our big change last year of awarding $8,000 scholarships to master’s degree students was hugely popular, and will be a continued effort this year as tuition costs continue to rise nationally. We know the fifth-year requirement can be a barrier in access to the profession for many students and hope this scholarship helps create the most qualified candidates by encouraging students to go for a master’s degree over a fifth year.

Foundation Grants

At the Foundation Reception in May, where Foundation Circle Contributors and Scholarship Reviewers have the opportunity to meet the year’s scholarship winners, we played an interactive trivia game to increase awareness of the program work being done by the Foundation and CPAPAC. We were surprised that many students and even Foundation contributors were unaware of the diversity grants being awarded by the Foundation.

This year marked our third year awarding up to $20,000 in grants to organizations that work within their communities to increase the pipeline of diverse students to the accounting profession.

• We supported two continuing initiatives from Western Washington University and South Puget Sound Community College with promising results. We’ll be sharing those stats as they become available within the next year.
• We also provided a grant to a first-time applicant this year. Degrees of Change is working on an internship program to support students in Pierce County, with the intent to create homegrown leaders. This past summer they added three new accounting internships to their program. As a result, they have had more interest from business majors in their wraparound internship programming, which includes one day a week of bringing all the interns in the program together for soft skills and leadership development training. We hope to support Degrees of Change to increase their relationships with local firms as they work toward their goal of offering more accounting internships by summer 2020.

Thanks for Your Support

Thanks to those who support the Foundation’s work through your dollars or volunteer time. It’s never too soon to start thinking about beefing up our scholarship review team for this spring. If you want to be added to that email list or are thinking about joining our scholarship review committee please reach out to me.

Monette Anderson is WSCPA Manager of Membership and liaison to the Washington CPA Foundation. You can contact her at manderson@wscpa.org.

This article appeared in the fall 2019 issue of the Washington CPA Magazine. Read more here.