At UVA McIntire, faculty in the M.S. in Accounting (MSA) program are designing coursework with a clear conviction: The most valuable preparation for early-career professionals comes from the kind of hands-on, judgment-driven work students will encounter from day one on the job. Three MSA educators, each approaching the mission from a different corner of the discipline, reveal how that philosophy shapes everything from project design to the cases students argue in writing.
Learning by Doing with Real Data
Yi Liang
Professor Yi Liang’s Data Management and Analytics for Accountants course, required of all MSA students, introduces database querying, business analytics, and artificial intelligence through a series of group projects that mirror real challenges professionals face. But Liang’s courses are less about mastering software than learning how accountants confront complex business problems.
One project asks students to investigate whether Big Four auditing firms charge a fee premium over other firms, and to determine if clients of those larger firms are less likely to issue financial restatements. “We examine Big Four auditors’ price premiums and whether they actually offer higher-quality services,” Liang says. Students clean and integrate multiple real-world datasets and run linear and logistic regressions using the data analytics and AI automation platform Alteryx. They then apply their findings to a cost-benefit analysis, deciding which type of auditor to hire. The exercise moves students through the full arc of a real analytical engagement: cleaning messy data, performing statistical modeling, and forming a concrete business recommendation at the end.
Another of Liang’s projects takes an even more open-ended approach. Students take on the role of internal analysts at a large U.S. bank, tasked with examining application data from the publicly available Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database. “The instructions are purposefully vague, mimicking an exploration process in the real world,” Liang says. Groups identify their own research questions, seek out supplemental data sources, build visualizations in software such as Tableau or Power BI, and write SQL queries in BigQuery. The deliberate ambiguity is the point: Early-career professionals rarely receive perfectly scoped problems, and learning to frame the question is as important as answering it.
Liang is also launching a new course in the fall of 2026, Accounting Analytics in Financial Markets. The class extends these skills into capital markets territory, examining how accounting information is priced by investors. The course asks students to think not as preparers of financial statements, but as sophisticated users of them, a perspective shift that mirrors the analytical demands of roles in investment analysis, equity research, and financial advisory.
Judgment and Skepticism as Teachable Skills
Jill Mitchell
If Liang’s courses teach students how to analyze information, Professor Jill Mitchell’s auditing classroom focuses on how professionals must question it. For Mitchell, who teaches Introduction to Auditing, the central challenge is developing qualities that no textbook can fully transmit. “The firms are clear that technical skills are table stakes,” Mitchell says. “What distinguishes early-career professionals today is curiosity, adaptability, and a readiness to work alongside emerging technologies, including AI.”
Mitchell designs her course around experiences that force students to inhabit the profession rather than read about it. Through a partnership with EY’s Academic Resource Center, students work through three digital learning experiences that simulate real audit contexts. In one, they use Celonis process mining software to analyze transaction flows at a fictional company and identify a control failure that caused a spike in uncollectible accounts receivable, a finding that may have been invisible through traditional sampling methods alone.
In another project, students step into a 3D virtual warehouse and physically navigate the space to conduct inventory counts, locating seeded errors tied to the fundamental audit assertions of existence, completeness, and valuation. In a third, an AI-powered inquiry simulation, students play both sides of a client interview, first as the client, then as the auditor. Mitchell argues that the immersive format allows students to experience the audit process from the client side, helping them develop the empathy and interpersonal awareness that distinguish skilled auditors from merely technical ones.
In spring 2026, her MSA students also tackled an unusually timely challenge: developing and presenting original teaching modules on how the COSO Internal Control Framework applies to regulatory compliance and generative AI governance. The project responded directly to a recent COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission) publication on AI internal controls, meaning students were synthesizing guidance with no existing textbook treatment. They presented to a combined undergraduate and graduate audience and created study materials shared across the program.
Mitchell, a former Auditor with EY who graduated from the MSA program herself, views this kind of work as the highest expression of graduate education: Students move beyond learning and applying the standards to analyzing emerging guidance on them and communicating it clearly to others.
Writing as Professional Practice
Harry Franks
Professor Harry Franks, who teaches Tax Research, builds his course around a deceptively simple premise: The only way to learn tax research is to do it. Students work through a series of research assignments across the semester, each requiring them to identify the relevant tax issue, analyze applicable authorities from the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, and case law, and share their conclusions in a professional memo.
“A correct answer is only part of the goal,” Franks says. “Researchers must be able to effectively communicate their research findings and conclusions and document the basis for these conclusions to others, such as management, peers, and clients. Otherwise, their research is useless.”
The capstone research assignment adds a dimension that many technical courses overlook. Students must produce both a detailed technical memo addressed to a tax specialist and a separate presentation on the same topic aimed at a non-technical audience, like a client, a CEO, or a board. The ability to translate complex analysis for different audiences is precisely the skill that separates effective advisers from merely knowledgeable ones. “This is absolutely a real-world application of their learning to real client work they will be likely to see in their first few years,” says Franks.
Across all three classrooms, the throughline is the same: McIntire’s MSA faculty are preparing graduates who can navigate ambiguity, exercise judgment, and communicate clearly. By the time students finish the program, they haven’t simply studied the profession; they have already rehearsed being active participants in it.
