AIS Personal Statement

Although I will be completing my undergraduate career in three years, with a 146 college credits and a 3.86 GPA, I have taken numerous quantitative courses not required for my undergraduate degree. I took Accounting Information Systems (AIS) which requires the understanding of accounting principles to covert those into systems an end user can utilize. As an Accounting Intern at Enterprise Holdings, I used the tools from my AIS class to research general ledger accounts, especially the bad debt. Knowing excel functions like VLOOKUP or knowing how to create pivot tables allowed me to more efficiently figure out what entries were affecting bad debt and why the entries were made. I also took a Database Management Systems class in which we learned

This includes Foundations and Applications of Data Analytics, which I took as an independent study course. During the course, I learned multiple machine learning techniques to analyze data and the thought process on deciding which techniques to utilize to discover the information hidden within raw data. My final project for this class required me to find my own data, process and analyze the data, and create a presentation of the findings. I decided to do my project on the effects race and economic status has on the passing test rate in Virginia Public Schools. To conduct the research, I found the school data files through the Virginia Department of Education's website; then, I uploaded the data containing the number of minority students and the number of disadvantaged students at each school into Python, so I could perform multiple statistical analysis. My research concluded that race and financial disadvantage students did not have a strong correlation, but only knowing the percent of financially disadvantage students at a school would allow you to correctly 37.6% of the time. Currently, I am taking Modeling and Simulation which utilizes programing to simulate the events and answer real world questions - for example, how many people have to be vaccinated in order to prevent a communicable disease from becoming an epidemic. I have earned an 4.0 GPA in my minor and have an

I run and maintain the www.umwpeertutoring.com website to fulfill the needs of the tutors and the tutees. I conduct surveys regularly to coordinate the tutors' schedules. At the end of each semester, I conduct a survey to determine what the tutors enjoyed and disliked throughout the semester and what topics they'd like to cover in the next semester. Then, I use this data to plan the trainings for the next semester. I train all the tutors at monthly all-staff meetings and train the new tutors at the new tutor meetings. To perform this effectively, I must ensure that I understand the material I am presenting at the meetings in order to communicate the information to the tutors. I usually accomplish this through a presentation followed by an activity. For example, during the Active Listening module, I talked about the difference between just listening to what someone says versus asking questions to ensure you understand what they are saying. Then, I explained the difference between a clarifying question - in which you want the speaker to explain the concept differently - versus a probing question - in which you want the speaker to consider the topic at a deeper level. The presentation was accomplished with the aid of a PowerPoint that provided examples of each. After the teaching portion, the tutors participated in a "Questions-Only" activity, in which the