Loren Swartzendruber ’76, MDiv ’79, DMin

After a couple of decades of massive scandals in the U.S. financial world – Enron, the savings and loan industry, the federal bail-out of this country’s top banks – it has become commonplace at business departments at colleges and universities across the country to speak of the value of “ethics” and of considering “the public good.”

At the risk of sounding immodest about EMU, our business and accounting professors have been raising such matters since this institution began offering business classes. Many of those interviewed for Crossroads credited their church-rooted parents for instilling in them the importance of maintaining their integrity and caring for the well-being of others, both at home and at work. But they also credited EMU for reinforcing this ethos.

That was certainly my personal experience, growing up in a business-oriented family and then attending EMU. My father owned a farm-implement dealership in Kalona, Iowa, where I worked from an early age through college. My first experience with “fundraising” was going into the fields to find farmers and ask for the payments they owed my father.

Dad could not stay in business, and keep supplying farmers with the equipment they needed, if he did not collect on debts. Yet, sometimes, in cases of real hardship, Dad did write-off debts. And my parents always contributed (financially and as volunteers in many roles) to our church, regardless of the economic circumstance, because they believed we were part of a larger church community that also could not survive without regular infusions of money.

Dad’s business practices were a bit unusual. He and his business partners paid themselves an hourly wage rather than take a salary. All employees received a bonus after a profitable year. In quite a few years Dad took unpaid “vacation” weeks to teach Summer Vacation Bible School in our home congregation and at a mission church out of state. For most of his 40+ year business career, Dad worked six days a week, but I didn’t mind because I was with him when I wasn’t in school.

We need our people in finances and business, and they need the thoughtfulness and ethical foundation that comes from being part of a larger community that asks the hard questions, as does an organization to which I belong, Mennonite Economic Development Associates. I believe this is why EMU was teaching about “ethics” and “the public good” long before many other educational institutions realized the importance of such teachings.

Loren Swartzendruber
President

Matthew Clemmer ’02

Among the 150 alumni contacted for this Crossroads, this note was struck often: the importance of the integrity of the individual financial expert and, by extension, the company represented by that person.

Most interviewees seemed to feel they had secured the right work situation for their skill set and ethical values. But they didn’t always arrive at this point immediately upon licensure as a CPA, completing an MBA, or earning a Certified Financial Planner designation. Perhaps a dozen interviewees parted from jobs at some point in their work journey as a result of feeling compromised or burned out, eventually finding something that fit them better.

Matthew Clemmer ’02, for example, was looking for a way to get a toehold in asset management when he landed a job in October 2005 with a Chicago-based private equity firm. There he joined an investment team managing a portfolio of over $200 million worth of real estate and commodity assets. Initially Clemmer thought this was his first big opportunity. Yet he left in July 2006 (10 months later) – so suddenly that he had lined up no other job – after realizing that his integrity was being compromised by dubious ethical practices.

In August 2008, at the start of the Great Financial Crisis – about the time his former employer was entering receivership – Clemmer was enrolled full-time in the MBA program at Boston College, while his wife, Sara Joy Bergey Clemmer ’03, was a campus recruiting manager for KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.

“I went underground [i.e., to grad school] for two years, while the financial world unraveled,” Clemmer jokes.

Today Clemmer loves what he does and, more importantly, who he does it for. Employed by Trilogy Global Advisors, a boutique investment management firm that manages $14 billion of institutional equity assets, Clemmer is an investment analyst focused on industrial and material companies domiciled in emerging markets – such as those in China, Brazil, and Indonesia. He is part of an investment team in Orlando, Florida, which manages assets for large public and private institutions globally.

“We invest so that pension-holders can retire,” he says. “We look for high quality companies that have durability, that are not a flash in the pan.” And such companies, by definition in his mind, need to demonstrate high ethical and corporate governance practices to be sustainable over the long term.

Importance of “guiding values”

Allon Lefever, an adjunct business professor at EMU, urges his MBA students to start with “guiding values” – put in writing and reviewed regularly – in any enterprise they undertake.

He often offers his own example: He worked with his son, Rod, and another business partner in the late 1990s to build an Internet service provider, OneMain.com, that went public in March 1999 with an Initial Public Offering that raised $215 million. They more than doubled OneMain’s customer base in 18 months and then sold it to Earthlink for $308 million in September 2001.

Before they did any of this, however, the three business partners agreed upon these five “guiding values,” which were presented to all potential investors:

• People – we will treat people (our employees, customers and suppliers) with fairness and respect.
• Quality – we will consistently and continuously exceed the expectations of our customers.
• Integrity – we will deal honestly and fairly with people in all our business relationships.
• Mutuality – we will work for the mutual success of our employees, customers and shareholders.
• Innovation – we will develop innovative solutions to meet our customers’ needs.

At a critical stage in the growth of OneMain, Lefever and his partners discovered that a significant client specialized in Internet-transmitted pornography. They ceased carrying his business on their network, despite the financial loss.

Lefever said he was fortunate to spend his first 16 years after college with a food-processing company that demonstrated that it was possible to uphold one’s religious beliefs and be profitable. The company was Victor Weaver Inc. (sold in 1986 to Holly Farms). By age 33 Lefever was vice president of operations, responsible for 2,000 employees. “Victor Weaver and his son Dale were very clear on who we are and why we do what we do. There was no work on Sunday, for example. Even the trucks didn’t get on the road until 12:01 a.m. Monday.”

Next Lefever joined the management team of High Industries, then led by two Mennonite brothers, Dale and Calvin High, son of the founder, Sanford. “Sanford would walk around the [steel] bridges being built by his company and tell his workers, ‘Do a continuous weld and give it a good measure.’ He always encouraged his employees to deliver more than the required specifications.”

Today Lefever runs smaller businesses – mainly a successful Hampton Inn in the Shenandoah Valley, plus some real estate investments. “I’ll be the first to admit that it’s increasingly difficult to stand for one’s values and implement them in a big company,” he muses. “The bigger you get, the more you lose control.”

Regaining control on the home front

After a succession of high-level jobs with the two largest privately held companies in the United States – Cargill and Koch Industries – Denise Yoder Miller ’85 and her husband, Luke Miller ’87 (accounting major, followed by an MBA) decided, “One of us is going to have to get off the corporate race track.”

They agreed Luke would keep running the race. He is based at the corporate headquarters of Cargill in Minnetonka, Minnesota, where he is a strategist, working to rationalize the ways 70 business units of Cargill interact with customers in 65 countries. ¹

Denise, a CPA, had been feeling ambivalent about her long work hours in the high-pressure Koch environment after she gave birth to their first child, Nicole, in 1999. Yet she also identified strongly with her highly responsible job. She was information technology controller, responsible for a $370-million shared service group for which she did financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasts.

When Nicole was 3, Denise had an epiphany: “I was at the point in my career where when I looked around, those above me had their secretaries purchase birthday gifts for their children. It occurred to me, why did I have a child if I wouldn’t be able to spend time with her? We had this beautiful daughter, and I decided I wanted to spend two years with her before she started school.” (In 2005 their second daughter, Samantha, was born.)

Previous to Koch, Denise had been financial analysis manager for Thorn Americas Inc., with annual revenues of $1 billion, and before that, financial analyst for Cargill’s division in Wichita, Kansas, with revenues of $300 million.

From Very Important Person in the corporate financial world, Denise rapidly moved to being Somebody Quietly Cherished in her family, children’s elementary school, and church. Denise runs a database of 400 classroom volunteers who serve an elementary school with 700-800 students within a district of 10,400 students. She is the volunteer treasurer for Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Previously, she was the volunteer treasurer for the non-profit Ten Thousand Villages store in nearby St. Paul.

“As a unit, Luke and I are balanced – I am able to give back where needed while he does the corporate job. It’s the season of my life. I would not have been satisfied at 23 to do what I am doing now. But now I really want to be able to have a purpose.”

She says she’ll likely resume full-time accounting by the time the children leave the nest, but she hopes it will be for a charitable foundation or the like.

Better business, community

Fred Brubaker ’66 can look back on his 34 years as lead accountant for a succession of two companies that produced products for maintaining lawns and gardens, the Steiner Corporation and Ventrac. He helped these companies provide desirable jobs for more than 100 folks in Orville, Ohio (pop. 8,380) – thereby fueling the local economy – while providing good-quality equipment to consumers.

Brubaker’s career in Orville began when two acquaintances from EMU, brothers Glenn ’66 and Roy ’68 Steiner, sought someone they felt they could trust to do the finances for Steiner Corp., their family-owned company.

Brubaker had been a history major at EMU. He then taught in Honduras with the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions for three years, before returning to college for an associate degree in accounting. This was in Wooster, Ohio, which led to working for the seven Steiner brothers.

“For 20 years, we in the management team would talk every day,” says Brubaker. “I would tell them what the numbers meant, though I can’t say I gave them the best advice at the beginning. I was on a learning curve, along with company.”

Today, Ventrac remains in the hands of the Steiner family and does about $15-$20 million in sales annually. Its top-selling product is an all-wheel-drive compact tractor, with over 30 possible attachments. Brubaker is mostly retired, though he works about a half day a week for Ventrac. He also does the books for SpringHaven, a local counseling center, and runs a small tax-return business.

In today’s fast-paced world of multi-national deals and mergers, Brubaker may be one of a vanishing breed who can look around at the community where he has lived for more than 40 years – where he and his wife raised their daughter, Jacinda (Zook) ’97, where the Steiner brothers lived – and see the impact of his life’s work in his immediate environs, not to mention the usefulness of nearly 8,000 Ventrac tractors spread across the nation. — Bonnie Price Lofton, MA’ 04, editor

1. Cargill has 142,000 employees worldwide and gross annual revenues of $133.9 billion.

Ronald L. Stoltzfus ’75

If you want to understand the passion of Ronald L. Stoltzfus for accounting – notably getting the numbers right, providing complete and transparent information, and putting the public good first – you need only look as far as the accountant he respects the most in the national arena: Lynn E. Turner.

As chief accountant for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1998 to 2001, Turner was a leading advocate of auditor independence rules and international accounting and auditing standards.

“He’s one of my heroes,” says Stoltzfus, who heads EMU’s accounting program in the business and economics department. “He understands that accounting information helps investors, creditors and other users make good decisions. This is why accurate, transparent financial information is a ‘public good.’”

Stoltzfus admires the way Turner speaks to accounting conventions, “asking the hard questions that need to be asked,“ says Stoltzfus. Turner, for example, has publicly questioned why the investigative budget of the SEC was drastically cut in 2007, hamstringing an agency responsible for enforcing the laws regulating the nation’s banks. (This was at a period when JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, and Bank of America were implicated in the global financial meltdown.)

Unlike Turner, Stoltzfus is not famous – at least not beyond certain university circles – but he shares Turner’s moral outrage at financial reporting practices that harm the public good.

This is why Stoltzfus is spending his 2012-13 sabbatical examining the way state governments report on the pension benefits they have promised to their employees. “Most state pension plans were fully funded seven years ago,” he says. “Now they aren’t.”

“Instead of following the recommendations of actuaries, many state legislatures have reduced the percentage of funds set aside for the pensions.”

In Pennsylvania, for example, Stoltzfus found that the state workers’ pension fund was underfunded by $14.7 billion as of 2011, partly the result of 10 years of sub-par investment returns and partly as a result of the state legislature cutting the set-aside money from 26% to 11% of payroll. (Stoltzfus cites “State Employees Retirement System, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report,” 06/30/11, p.72.)

Unfortunately, many states report similar patterns, he says: “Why are they [the legislatures] messing with the pension funds? Is this a short-sighted effort to balance the state budget at the expense of state workers?”

Stoltzfus hopes to publish his findings as soon as he wraps up his research. This is not a dry academic exercise; underfunded pensions funds will impact tens of thousands of public employees in the state of Pennsylvania alone.

For Stoltzfus, accounting is a high calling – right up there with being a skilled physician or a wise pastor. “To run a business, non-profit or a government agency, you must have properly trained people who know how to collect the right data and present it understandably, giving accurate answers to a host of questions.”

“Good CPAs [Certified Public Accountants] are problem-solvers for their clients,” he enthuses. “And auditors are like forensic investigators – they have to be very bright and very astute. Behind every major business reporting failure, there was an audit failure.”

Stoltzfus says a flaw in the U.S. audit system is the fact that the auditor is paid by the company being audited. He points to the way Arthur Andersen – one of the “Big Five” accounting firms until 2002 – was getting a million dollars a week from Enron at time when it was fraudulently reporting its financial position, deluding its investors. (Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001.)

In addition to being a CPA and an EMU alum, Stoltzfus holds a PhD in accounting from Virginia Commonwealth University, a master’s in accounting from James Madison University, and a master of business administration from Shippensburg University.

“Its very unusual for a university this size to have somebody with a PhD teaching accounting, “ says Spencer Cowles, PhD, chair of EMU’s business and economics department. “It’s also unusual to find someone with a CPA and a PhD in accounting who also has an MBA. Ron doesn’t just have a narrow technical perspective – he understands how accounting fits into business.”

PhD-holding scholars of accounting like Stoltzfus are in short supply nationally, according to the American Accounting Association. This may explain the salaries they can command on the academic market. New hires as full professors of accounting received a mean salary of $169,200 in 2009, according to a 2009-2010 salary survey conducted by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

“The highest salary you can get as an accounting professor at EMU is probably half what you could get at a major university with a full-fledged graduate program in accounting,” says Cowles. Yet Stoltzfus, long-time treasurer of his Park View Mennonite Church, has stayed put at EMU since arriving here in 1984, after a decade of being a controller in the private sector. His motivations clearly are beyond money.

“I believe in the mission of EMU. I think we make a difference in young people’s lives,” he says. No accounting student “gets lost here…. I know if you aren’t prepared and if you’re not in class.”

The exams that Stoltzfus puts his students through are intended to prepare them for the multi-day exam marathons that they will need to endure to pass their CPA exams. In short, EMU’s accounting exams are really tough. But, as dozens of accounting graduates have told Crossroads, the pay-off is success in graduate school and in getting the coveted CPA license with relative ease.

Stoltzfus also stays put because “I have great colleagues. Our department really values teaching in a liberal arts context where clear thinking and clear writing are very important,” he says. “And so are relationships and understanding the broader context of business and society. It’s not just about accounting.” — Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04

Wilmer Lehman ’57 and Millard Showalter ’62

“When I first began working at Eastern Mennonite College,” recalls professor emeritus Wilmer Lehman ’57, “teaching at EMC was seen as a kind of mission of the church.” Back in the era of Sputnik, math education was a carefully calculated national priority, and teachers of mathematics were in high demand. This small private school struggled to compete with the demand for higher-level mathematicians generated by Cold War anxieties, especially given its status as a Christian-pacifist institution that garnered no funding for defense-related work.

But being a devout Anabaptist, Lehman opted to take the proverbial “road less traveled” in U.S. academia and returned to teach at his alma mater two years after graduation. “When I came [for the 1959-60 school year], I did not know what my yearly salary would be,” Lehman says. “I found that it was about $2,500, spread over nine or ten months – all of which it took just to live. We had to scrape by in the summers.” Later, Lehman would earn a master of arts in teaching with a math concentration from Cornell University and become a full professor at EMU.

Lehman became the foundation of what has grown into a thriving program in the mathematical sciences. Early in his 40-year career at EMU, he taught Millard Showalter ’62 and then recruited him to be a fellow faculty member. Lehman’s education continued, even as he was educating another generation. In the early 1990s, Lehman earned a second master’s degree (this time an MA in Christian leadership, focusing on counseling) at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in order to prepare himself for leadership roles in his congregation, Mt. Clinton Mennonite Church, and the conference to which it belongs.

Like Lehman, Showalter earned his graduate degrees while working for minimal pay at EMU. Showalter holds two master’s degrees, one in math from the University of South Carolina and another master’s in arts (with a math major) from Vanderbilt, and an EdD from the University of Virginia.

“Millard was quite popular,” said Lehman, adding he was gifted at making math understandable and enjoyable. In fact, at one point Showalter’s students wore T-shirts that read “Millard’s Magnificent Mathematicians.”

Lehman and Showalter taught in tandem for decades – serving under four presidents and seven academic deans – until Showalter retired in 1998, with Lehman following in 2000. Both were beloved for their willingness to work one-on-one with students having difficulty in math, acting as both tutor and encourager.

In the summer 2011 issue of Crossroads, Lehman displayed his “mission” approach to teaching in an anecdote recounted by Wayne Lawton ’71. Lawton had returned to college as an older adult and was struggling to catch up in math. Serving as a pastor in Waynesboro while taking classes, Lawton sheepishly approached Lehman, asking if more help might be possible. Lehman replied, “When you pastor a church, do you mind people coming to you for help?” When Lawton said no, Lehman replied, “Well, I don’t mind helping you!”

Showalter recalls his years teaching with Lehman at EMU as “the best years of my life.” Although he struggled both to make math interesting to students and to integrate changes in technology and teaching methods, he credits his students for making his career memorable. “I was very fortunate to have had excellent math majors. My students not only challenged me to be a better teacher, but also brought creativity and a desire to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.” Perhaps because of his infectious enthusiasm – he once spent an entire sabbatical rewriting lesson plans to adjust to technological changes – it is no surprise that Showalter says: “If I were to again be given the opportunity to choose a life career, I don’t doubt that teaching mathematics at EMU would be my first choice.”

Reflecting on the “ripple effects” coming from his lengthy career, Lehman realizes that he’s internalized some aspects of teaching. “I’m always on my best behavior, no matter where I go,” he says. “I never know when I’m going to run into a former student. I’ve run into them as far away as the Nairobi (Kenya) marketplace.”

In addition to Lehman and Showalter, four other EMU alumni taught mathematical sciences for extended stints: two members of the class of 1962, Del Snyder and Donald C. Miller (who also attended the seminary in 1976-77); Roy E. Heatwole ’64; and John L. Horst ’60, who taught both physics and mathematics and coached award-winning teams in international math-modeling competitions.

When Joe Mast ’64 was a student at EMU in the early 1960s his long-term goal was to be a high school math and physics teacher.  “At the time, I did not aspire to teach at the college level,” he says. “[But] I had a great interest in astronomy and electronics.” His physics professor, Robert Lehman, encouraged him to pursue astronomy and return to his alma mater.

As a student at EMU, Mast helped to manage the WEMC radio station as chief engineer and station manager and was part of the Astral Society, which focused on astronomy. In the Cold War era, space-race money was available, and he received a special fellowship that allowed him to pursue a master’s degree and a PhD at the University of Virginia, both in astronomy. Upon returning to then-EMC as a faculty member, the college received its first computer under a grant to small colleges. Mast became EMU’s first computer science professor.

On sabbatical in 1978, Mast went to JMU, where he studied computer science courses, and later received a second master’s degree in computer science. He returned to EMU, where he ushered in a two-year associate’s degree in computer processing, followed several years later by a major in computer science.

In response to a need by fellow EMU employees for banking services, in 1969 Mast helped to found Park View Federal Credit Union, an idea originating with Dan Bender and developed by Robert Lehman. Three years later Mast began managing the credit union out of his office in the basement of the Suter Science Center, continuing for 10 years.

One of EMU’s best-known mathematical sons is Robert P. Hostetler ’59, who retired from teaching in 1996 and only stopped writing textbooks in 2007. He now lives as a retiree within walking distance of EMU.

Hostetler holds a bachelor’s degree in secondary education (math certification) from EMU, a master’s degree in mathematics, and a doctorate in mathematics education, both graduate degrees from Penn State University.

Hostetler is perhaps one of the most successful authors of math education texts in any language; his books have been used widely by students and teachers for decades. About 300 titles with Hostetler’s name as author or co-author reside on the Barnes and Noble website. Google Books puts the total count of books, editions, study guides – anything with his name – at about 2,400. Some of Hostetler’s dozens of textbooks have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese; they range from college algebra, trigonometry and calculus to The Mathematics of Buying.

One of Hostetler’s challenges as a professor, he says, “was how to share my Christian faith with students,” given the constraints of teaching at a state-supported university, which necessarily is based on the separation of church and state. After consulting with his pastor, Hostetler decided that he would “self-identify” with the faith when introducing himself to each new class. “I simply stated that I am a Christian; I believe in a living God to whom I pray for guidance in my teaching and relationships with you students,” he told them. “I want to do my best for you.” He says he sometimes learned the outcome of his “sharing of faith” years later, when former students would get back in touch and tell him, “Dr. Hostetler, guess what—I’ve become a Christian! What you shared in that first day of calculus class, I just couldn’t get out of my mind over the years, so I’ve made that decision!”

Outside of the university, Hostetler has shared his faith and enthusiasm for teaching and learning as a Sunday School teacher for more than 40 years.

In the spring 2006 issue of Crossroads, Hostetler spoke about an unusual sabbatical he took in 1997-98 during which he taught without pay at EMU as a way of “going back to my roots.”

In comparing his classes at EMU and those at Behrend College of Penn State University, Hostetler said the classes were similarly sized – about 30 to 32 students, with comparable academic abilities. He used the same textbooks (his own), the same curriculum and grading standards at both universities. Though the percentage of students at the high and low ends of the grading spectrum was the same, it was the middle group of students that surprised Hostetler. “At EMU, the middle group of students went up in their performance [as the semesters progressed]; at Penn State, the middle group shifted downward.”

Hostetler attributed the improved performance of the average student at EMU to “a more caring faculty, the work ethic of students at EMU, the community spirit that helped each student to feel valued, and the fact that EMU students act with Christian charity toward one another and help each other out.” Plus, he added, “attention was given to all students equally, rather than just to the excellent or the deficient.”

At the University Park Campus of Penn State, James L. Rosenberger ’68 is an internationally recognized statistician, with a master’s degree from Polytechnic Institute of New York and a doctorate from Cornell University. He says that EMU professor Roy Heatwole first sparked his interest in working with statistics. Graduating with a major in math, Rosenberger was able to secure 1-W conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War by working as an analyst and programmer in the Cardiovascular Research Center at New York University Medical Center.

Rosenberger, who is now vice-president of the 18,000-member American Statistical Association, believes statisticians are uniquely situated in positions where ethical decisions are amplified. “We are constantly faced with real data which can easily be misrepresented for the benefit of proving a point. Understanding the importance of integrity informs much of my work,” he says. “I teach students and consult with researchers to honestly represent the uncertainty in the conclusions of a study or research experiment.”

During the past decade, Rosenberger has guided the development of an online professional master of applied statistics program at Penn State, aimed at mid-career professionals who cannot return to graduate school full time. “More than 500 students enroll in our graduate courses each semester, allowing us to extend the reach of statistics education beyond the campus,” he says.

To Rosenberger, statistics is “a wonderful profession.” Not only is it a challenge learning the language of scientific collaboration, but it is a quest for truth. “We can get involved in so many interesting disciplines and issues, always facing uncertain information and mountains of data,” he says, “to which we apply our tools and skills to uncover the truth.”

Rosenberger’s accomplishments include: a 2011 Distinguished Service Award from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, election to Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, serving as program director at the National Science Foundation, and lecturing around the globe.

One of Millard Showalter’s students, Merle Reinford ’72, has gone on to earn a graduate degree in math (where most of his courses were easier than those at EMU, he says) and to devote nearly 40 years to teaching math students at Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonite High School. Some semesters, he also teaches math as an adjunct at Millersville University.

Sharpening the minds of his high school students, he has spent 33 years coaching competitive chess, eventually getting elected president of the regional scholastic chess league.

Reinford’s coaching successes are dramatic. In 33 years his high school teams won 11 league titles, with runner-up success 13 more times. Reinford’s chess teams have accumulated a plethora of state competition titles, with a record of 315 wins to 90 losses and 23 ties. “I have used my enjoyment of the game to play chess with homeless men,” he says. “I am not sure if you could call that a ministry or not,” given how much fun he has.

After graduating from EMU, Larry Lehman ’79 got a fellowship at University of Virginia, where he earned his doctorate. He credits two of his math professors, Millard Showalter and Del Snyder, with preparing him for his own professorship at University of Mary Washington, where he spent six years as chair of the math department. “They [Snyder and Showalter] emphasized not just knowledge of facts, but consideration of why things are true, how different mathematical concepts fit together.”

Larry Lehman emphasizes the role that EMU played in his upbringing from childhood: “It was more than a school, but very much my home community.” He has embraced the educational spirit he saw in his EMU instructors. “Teaching has its challenges, of course, particularly with finding new ways to interest and motivate students, but so far I am still enjoying the challenge.”

Wendell Ressler ’80 stayed in Harrisonburg to teach high school math and physics after he graduated from EMU, and then earned his master’s degree from James Madison University. Ressler, who now holds a PhD from Temple University, found himself thirsting for more knowledge. “I loved studying analytic number theory,” he says. “In retrospect, it seems that I kept trying to get off the academic track, but curiosity kept pulling me back. Or, maybe I just liked being a student.”

Now a math professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., Ressler does research in the abstract stream of his field – automorphic integrals, Dirichlet series, and Hecke correspondence. He has an obvious affection for proofs and logic, which he says was nurtured by his EMU profs. “By far the most important thing I learned from Millard Showalter and Del Snyder was how to prove things: how to think about proofs, and how to write them,” he says. “I didn’t have as many fancy courses in my background as many other students in graduate school, but that did not matter because I knew how to prove things.”

Ressler has also found himself living many of the core EMU values of peace and social justice. “My peace and justice classes with Ray Gingerich and Titus Bender influenced my thinking a lot. I volunteered with the Mediation Center and Christians for Peace when I lived in Harrisonburg, and with St. Vincent’s Peace Center in Germantown when I lived in Philadelphia. I did war tax resistance and eventually the IRS garnished my wages.”

Ressler is now focused on pursuing environmental justice. He volunteers at Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster, where he pays a voluntary “gas tax” to discourage driving and fund green upgrades for the congregation. He is an avid bicyclist, another love with roots at EMU. “One of my housemates at EMC got me to buy a used bicycle. I loved riding around Harrisonburg and started commuting by bicycle to work. I estimate that I have ridden about 50,000 miles since I graduated from EMC.” Ressler believes that bicycles may help save us from the problems of internal combustion.

Deirdre Smeltzer ’87 returned to EMU in 1998 after graduating from the University of Virginia with an MS and a PhD in mathematics.

Recalling her undergraduate years at EMU, Smeltzer credits two professors, Millard Showalter in Calculus II and Del Snyder in Discrete Math, for nurturing her interest in higher-level mathematics.

“Millard made class interesting, and I found myself doing his homework first,” she says. “In Discrete Math, I discovered that I really loved the abstract, logical thinking required – much more than the hands-on labs of chemistry, which was another major that I was considering.”

As an EMU faculty member, Smeltzer has taught courses on more than two dozen topics in her field and is author or co-author of a number of peer-reviewed articles and a textbook. In the current academic year, she has directed EMU’s extensive cross-cultural programs on a part-time basis. In the late spring, she was named EMU’s vice president and undergraduate dean, effective July 1, 2013.

During his time as an undergrad at EMU, Mark D. Risser ’07 was involved in student government, the student newspaper, and was recipient of a presidential scholarship award. After graduating, Risser worked for EMU in the admissions department before being pulled back to the discipline of rigorous academics. “Working in admissions was a fantastic experience, and allowed me to sink my roots a little deeper into the greater Mennonite community,” he says. “But as I didn’t have an outlet for the mathematical side of my brain, I started feeling the draw of returning to school for something math-related.”

After consulting with his former professors, Deirdre Smeltzer and Owen Byer, Risser was “hooked” on the idea of grad school, and decided to pursue a PhD in statistics. He is now a doctoral student at Ohio State University and recently received his MS (also at Ohio State), where he is also involved in research on HyFlex (hybrid, flexible) education methods. Risser says he hopes to have the kind of impact on a future generation of college students as his EMU teachers had on him.

A common characteristic of all of our alumni in higher-level, academic studies of numbers is a strong appreciation for, and commitment to, the EMU community. “Once I joined the EMU faculty and took on its mission,” Mast says, “I was willing to sacrifice many things to advance the program to the best of my abilities.”

The faculty’s sacrificial efforts seem to have borne fruit: “My educational experiences grounded me in a distinctive Christian understanding where the things I believe impact my life style and goals,” says Jim Rosenberger from his perch as the leading academic statistician at the University Park Campus of Penn State. “In particular, integrity became a central core value from lessons learned at EMU.” — Evan Knappenberger, class of 2014

Milton Loyer ’67

Here’s the thing about statistics in this day and age: anyone can enter data into Microsoft Excel and, with a few clicks of the mouse, execute any number of statistical procedures and end up with any number of statistical outputs. Even a kindergartener could do it, right?

Indeed, as long as that kindergartner was skilled at detecting and correcting errors in the original data set, knew which specific statistical procedure was most relevant to a particular experimental objective, and could deliver a meaningful interpretation of the resulting output. That means people like Milton Loyer ’67 are still awfully handy to have around at places like the Penn State Fruit Research and Extension Center in Biglerville, Pennsylvania, where he evaluates research on fertilizers, pesticides and crop management strategies.

Loyer spends much of his time combing through enormous sets of data, sometimes up to 10,000 lines at a time, in which there are bound to be keystroke errors (researchers, especially grad students, aren’t always as meticulous in this regard as a statistician would like). Sometimes the errors are obvious, like when a misplaced decimal point throws a figure off by one or more orders of magnitude. Other times, the errors are much more sneaky and subtle, revealed only in patterns that rouse Loyer’s suspicions and send him on the hunt for an explanation.

One example was a set of growth measurements from the orchard, in which the shoots appeared to be longer and shorter on alternating trees in a constant pattern – first longer, then shorter, longer, shorter. Loyer wandered out to the field to ask the workers how they’d collected the data. The orchard is big, they told him, and the job is boring. To keep things interesting, two of them had alternated roles at every tree. One would measure the shoots, and one would write down the numbers. They had used different measuring sticks, and on closer inspection, Loyer found that one of the sticks had an extra 2 millimeters on the end below the true zero mark. The mystery was solved and the data were adjusted accordingly. Excel can’t do that kind of thing.

After graduating with a math degree from EMU, Loyer went on to earn his PhD at Montana State University. He later taught at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania (EMU math professor Owen Byer was a student of Loyer’s there in the mid-’80s). In addition to his work as a statistician, he runs the archives of the United Methodist Church’s Susquehanna Conference at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he is also an adjunct math professor. He also finds time to manage his own affordable housing ministry in Williamsport, do some occasional statistical consulting, and, recently, “after much thought, several false starts, and helpful insight from colleagues” explain a mind-bending, paradoxical result that turned up in the statistical analysis of an apple defect study.1

The real breakthrough came after a summary of this paradox – which he’s trying to popularize as “Loyer’s paradox” – was booted from Wikipedia on grounds of being impossible. The insight that led to Loyer’s explanation of the paradox was sparked during subsequent discussion of the matter with Wikipedia’s statistics editor (although the solution has been published, the entry has yet to be reinstated on Wikipedia). That’s something Excel won’t do either.  — Andrew Jenner ’04

1. Loyer, Milton W. and Gene D. Sprechini. “Can the Probability of an Event Be Larger or Smaller Than Each of Its Component Conditional Probabilities?” Chance: A Magazine for People Interested in the Analysis of Data 24.1 (2011): 44-53. Print.

What else do John Buckwalter ’88 in Phoenix, Arizona, Kermit Kauffman ’79 in Tampa, Florida, and Keith Yoder ’77, in Atlanta, Georgia, have in common?

Answer: They all were raised in small farming communities, and all ended up being top financial managers in major city-based corporations that had nothing to do with farming.

Here are their stories.

JOHN BUCKWALTER

John Buckwalter ’88

John Buckwalter’s father owned a small car dealership in John’s hometown of Wellman, Iowa (pop. 1,100), plus another one in Washington, Iowa. “My friends at Iowa Mennonite School viewed me as a city slicker,” he recalls with amusement. He wasn’t, but he wanted to be.

After acing the CPA exam at the end of his senior year at EMU(in the 1980s, you could get a CPA without 150 hours of coursework), Buckwalter packed everything he owned into his Chevrolet Cavalier and headed to Phoenix, where his older sister was living.

He started as a roofer in the broiling summer sun of Phoenix. His sister, who was a client of the accounting firm known as Deloitte, passed his résumé to the firm and, amazingly (he says, as he looks back on matters now), he was called in for an interview.

Normally, a Big Four accounting firm would have finished its recruiting a year earlier and then from the so-called elite universities with undergraduate and graduate accounting programs. But one of Deloitte’s young recruits for the Phoenix office backed out on his commitment to arrive in the fall, suddenly leaving an opening.

Buckwalter had straight As, but his grades were from an “unproven school.” To the surprise of Deloitte’s bigwigs, however, he had scored in the top three in Virginia on the CPA exam he took the previous May and soon would receive the Elijah Watts Sells Award, a highly prestigious national honor from the American Institute of CPAs (in 2011, it was conferred on 37 takers of the CPA exam out of 90,000 candidates).

Buckwalter credits his then-EMC accounting professor, Ronald Stoltzfus, for putting his students through “killer mid-terms” that lasted four hours, followed by equally arduous and long final exams. With such rigorous preparation, Buckwalter did not find the CPA exam to be unduly difficult. “Ron certainly influenced my career,” Buckwalter says.

Buckwalter started as a “worker bee,” auditing financial statements, but quickly moved to taxes. The system demanded much of its lower-level accountants. “You are trying to make a lot of people happy while doing multi-tasking. It’s rough and tumble at the bottom,” says Buckwalter.

As one rises in the firm, you shed the number of bosses you report to, Buckwalter explains, but ultimately it is a pyramid scheme, whereby more than 95% of those originally hired will have no chance to become a partner in the firm. “A lot go to beauty school,” he says wryly, “but few get chosen. Would I have been chosen? That’s one of the questions in my life that I’ll never have an answer to.”

In 1998, Buckwalter got a call from a recruiter who told him that Starwood, a rapidly growing company in the hospitality space, would be interested in interviewing him.

Today Buckwalter is Starwood’s vice president of corporate tax, overseeing 10 staffers and consulting with external lawyers and accountants. He estimates that he puts in 12 hours a day, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., organizing “defense” by managing IRS audits and “offense” by finding ways to reduce the taxes paid by Starwood.

Of the $9 billion in assets held by Starwood,¹ Buckwalter has done “creative tax planning” – always within the law – to see that taxes do not have to be paid on all of the billions in asset transactions. “I would never want to take a position that would be embarrassing if discovered,” says Buckwalter.

Buckwalter smiles at the recollection that some folks in Wellman wondered why he didn’t simply step into his father’s car business, as his brother did. “One of the things I am most proud of is that I came out here with nothing but what I learned from my parents and the education they supported me through,” he says. “I have earned everything here the hard way.”

His father was influential, in teaching him how to handle people – by elevating them and not tearing them down, and treating customers fairly, Buckwalter says.

“I believe good things will come my way if I build up my team,” he says. In his department, “we invest in each other and support each other,” in contrast to the counter-model in some parts of Corporate America, where blame is liberally assigned and people often are torn down.

Buckwalter and his wife, Pam (a former schoolteacher), have an 11-year-old daughter, Kamryn, and an 8-year-old son, Jack. The family attends Scottsdale Bible Church in the eastern suburbs of Phoenix.

KERMIT KAUFFMAN

Kermit Kauffman ’79

On a farm in Kalispell, Montana, grew up five Kauffman brothers. All of them headed east for a year or more at either Eastern Mennonite High School or College. N. Leroy ’77 was first, followed by Kermit and Galen, both ’79 grads, and Marlin, class of ’88. Jerry attended the high school, graduating in 1981 and eventually marrying Mary Beth Yoder, a ’77 nursing grad.

Only Marlin returned permanently to the family farm. Two of the brothers, Kermit and Leroy, chose financial careers, with Kermit passing the CPA exam and joining the accounting operation of Media General in Richmond, Virginia, and Leroy becoming an academic (MBA at U. of Montana, PhD at Ohio State), who now teaches accounting, finance and economics at Western Carolina University.

Media General turned out to be a great place for Kermit Kauffman to go fast and far. By global standards, it was a medium-sized multi-media company controlled by the Bryan family of Virginia. From its base of two daily newspapers in Richmond, Media General acquired about 60 more newspapers. It also expanded into broadcast television, starting with WFLA-TV in Tampa, Florida, and growing to 18 TV stations, mostly in the southeast United States. In 1994, Media General embraced the Internet business, partnering first with Prodigy and then starting tbo.com, in Tampa.

In 1986, seven years after joining Media General, Kauffman was named CFO of its chain of California weeklies. In 1990, Media General moved Kauffman from Anaheim, California, to Tampa, where he started as controller of The Tampa Tribune and progressed to vice president of administration, in charge of the finance and information technology functions for The Tampa Tribune, WFLA-Newschannel 8, and tbo.com, the online operation for the news outlets.

“We were an industry leader with what we called convergence – online, broadcast and print operating as one,” Kauffman says. “We had one finance department and one IT department, and our news and advertising people worked closely together.”

As anyone who has paid attention in the last decade knows, a workable financial model for delivering news in the Internet age has not yet been found. Kauffman found himself in a difficult position: “It was tough, especially in 2003 and 2004 when you could see that advertising wasn’t going to bounce back.” Automotive advertising was down, real estate advertising practically disappeared, and recruitment went totally to the web.

“In the 90s, we had a downturn, but the economy and the advertising market came back,” he says. “In the early 2000s, the problems were more systemic.” Kauffman was part of implementing several rounds of layoffs at the Tribune. There was no choice – the company had to stay profitable – but the layoffs were troubling.

Given the trend lines, Kauffman sold his Tribune stock and retired in 2007. “I was lucky enough to have that option, but it ended up being smart to do.”²

Not ready to let him go, Media General asked Kauffman to work as a consultant in advance of Super Bowl XLIII, held in Tampa in 2009. Media General was a sponsor of the local host committee. Kauffman was put in charge of handling the local print and television interests for the NFL event.

He chuckles at the recollection that he had 165 choice tickets to the Super Bowl in his office the weekend before the game, all destined to be used to enhance ties between Media General and its advertisers. Yet, “the best part of that gig was the fact that I was able to take one of my brothers and a nephew to the game.”

Outside of his paid work, Kauffman served for 15 years on the board of a Tampa shelter for victims of domestic violence. When their CFO left unexpectedly, he filled in as its interim CFO for the last nine months of 2009. He remembers the experience as particularly eye-opening regarding the tenuousness of budgets that depend on government and private grants. “There were times when I wondered if we could make payroll or cover the electric bill. But we always managed to make it happen.”

For fun, Kauffman and two friends formed an adult kickball league in 2010 for which they charged $65 per participant for an eight-week season plus a final tournament. When Kauffman extricated himself from this venture in January 2013, the league was attracting 600 players per season and its revenues were approaching $100,000 per year. “Your biggest challenges in that business are lighted fields and enough parking,” he says. (For more info, see http://kickballsociety.com/)

Kauffman had other things he wanted to do with his time, like get ready for a half-marathon in New York City in March 2013. He’s done 11 full marathons, including ones in Boston, Berlin, Paris and New York.

Recently Kauffman made what will likely be his last career move. He became CFO of GSP Retail (gspretail.com), a family-owned business in Tampa employing 380. The company is a specialty signage and technology company, producing signage for the convenience-store industry across the country. GSP also develops and markets software to help its customers manage their store layouts, merchandising and signage installation. “I’ve been asked if I got bored [being retired],” he says. “Not at all, but it just seemed like something I would enjoy.”

Reflecting on his work life, Kauffman says: “I think I’ve gotten where I have because I had a good grounding in ethics early on. I learned from my parents that it’s important to do things right. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

“I have a strong sense of right and wrong. If you cut corners or bend the rules, it will come back to haunt you. You don’t want to regret what you’ve done; you need to feel good about doing things the way you did.”

KEITH J. YODER

Keith J. Yoder ’77

“Growing up on a dairy farm, I learned that hard work and working as a team brought success,” said Keith J. Yoder ’77, thinking about the 350-plus acres on which his great-grandfather settled in west-central Ohio.

By the mid-1920s, that land had been sub-divided into three farms for his children, one of which was eventually farmed by Yoder’s father and mother for more than 50 years outside the town of West Liberty.

“Ultimately, I thought there were options that suited me better than working on the farm, but what I learned about hard work and teamwork would be integral to success in any career,” Yoder recalls. He headed to Hesston College in Kansas for two years, and then transferred to EMU.

As a business administration major, Yoder thought the health-care arena “could provide value” and would fit well with his Mennonite background. On a return visit to EMU he met and later married Mary Claire, a graduate of James Madison University (JMU) whom he met when she managed EMU’s public radio station, WEMC.

Mary Claire was from the Tidewater area, so the couple felt a tug towards eastern Virginia. After earning an MBA from JMU (and having taken most if not all the accounting courses EMU offered), Yoder got an entry-level accounting job at Richmond Memorial Hospital.

By 1981, Yoder had passed his CPA exam, and was director of finance for the Long Term division of Sentara Healthcare Inc. in Norfolk, a large not-for-profit healthcare system. “The skilled nursing side was growing. We had five or six nursing facilities at that time.”

In 1992, Yoder accepted an offer to be CFO and vice president of Evergreen Healthcare Inc., headquartered in Indianapolis. “By late 1994 [when he was managing a financial staff of 55], we knew we had to get really big or merge with somebody else. At the time, we had 73 nursing homes and $200 million in revenues.”

Evergreen merged with GranCare – with Yoder aboard as treasurer and controller – yielding a system of 230 facilities and $650-$700 million in revenues. “I was doing a lot of traveling to many locations, including Wall Street in New York, to raise capital. It could give you a false sense of importance because the reality was you could be one transaction from merging yourself out of a job,” Yoder says. “It was an environment which required us to keep completing transactions – keep growing or selling – to maintain your stock price and to keep your investors happy.” This was the late 1990s, Yoder notes, when the market demanded “growth or get out.”

“It was an interesting time, especially for someone from my background.” After a pause, he adds, “You could get pushed to places you didn’t want to be, but my background provided the understanding to do things the right way.”

Over an eight-year period, Yoder played a leading role in enabling the companies in which he was involved to grow their revenues from $100 million to $1 billion, derived from nursing homes, assisted living facilities, institutional pharmacy and home-health operations.

From 2003 to 2011, Yoder was based in Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio, working as CFO for Atrium Centers LLC, which he helped grow from 13 to 43 nursing care facilities, with $220 million in revenues.

Family and friend considerations, along with a start-up opportunity, weighed heavily in a decision by Keith and Mary Claire to settle in Atlanta in 2011– where they had lived as a family from 1995 to 2007 (when he worked for GranCare and then as executive vice president of a dental and vision insurance company, with $240 million in revenues). This is where two of their adult children had settled, and where Keith and Mary Claire felt most at home.

Today, Yoder is a consultant bringing to the table his extensive experience with financial reporting, regulatory compliance, risk management, mergers and acquisitions, investor presentations, systems conversions and integrations, and operational and capital budgeting.

“When I left EMC and JMU, I never had any idea that I would have the opportunities that I’ve had,” he says. “I was often in the right place at the right time and utilized those opportunities to share what I had learned along the way, beginning with what my parents showed me – hard work and teamwork – on the farm. I have enjoyed the experience of growing companies, getting the right systems in place, and building great teams. That [team building] has turned out to be one of my strengths.” — Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04

1. Starwood is the largest luxury hotel owner and manager in the world, with hotels operating under the Sheraton, Le Méridien, Westin, W, and St. Regis brands, among others. Rivaled only by the Marriott Corporation, Starwood owns or manages 1,100 hotels in 100 countries, with 170,000 employees, yielding $6 billion in annual revenues.

2. When Warren Buffet announced in May 2012 that he was paying $142 million in cash to acquire most of Media General’s daily newspapers, he declined to include The Tampa Tribune in his group of 25 acquisitions.

Midday sun at SNL’s headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia, frames (from left) Enea Rrapokushi ’07, Isaac Wyse ’10 and Braden Long ’08. (Also at headquarters but missing from the photo is Amina Auezova Shenk ’07.)

You know how Americans picture the CIA combing the world to collect data, keeping careful tabs on which political faction is rising or falling in what country, and which dealer is funneling arms to what rebel movement?

Now shift to the private sector and picture a corporation that combs the world as intensively, or more, than the CIA. Its mission: to collect and sell financial and market-related data to players in the global economy, including financial institutions, energy companies, real estate investors, natural resource extractors, and media companies.

That company is SNL Financial, which bills itself as “the premier provider of breaking news, financial data and expert analysis on business sectors critical to the global economy.”

The headquarters of SNL is in a somber-looking building on prime real estate at the east end of the downtown pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, Va. It’s an hour’s drive from EMU and the home base of four of the six EMU graduates who work at SNL – Isaac Wyse ’10, Braden Long ’08, Amina Auezova Shenk ’07, Enea Rrapokushi ’07, Travis Geiser ’04, and Eric Reinford ’02.

(Geiser now works from Chicago and Reinford from London, England, but both started with SNL in Charlottesville. Two grads who started at SNL headquarters – Bradley Hoffman ’02 and Nathaniel “Nate” Overly ’02– eventually parted amicably with SNL to accept opportunities offered in other geographic locations.)

Reinford, a business administration major (like five of his fellow alumni at SNL), was the first EMU graduate to be hired by SNL, upon the recommendation of his EMU business professor Spencer Cowles. SNL chose Reinford to be among its core group of 300 employees on the eve of starting its global expansion. ¹

“We’ve grown to 2,300 FTEs in the past 10 years and hope to grow by 20% or more again this year,” says Reinford, who has officially resided in the United Kingdom for the last six years, but who actually spends much of his time traveling around the world as associate director in the new product research and development team. He focuses mainly on the banking sector, “expanding existing sector coverage to new markets or expanding into new sectors entirely.”

In 2011, Reinford circulated among 15 countries in Europe. In 2012, he shifted his attention to Asia, traveling to 15 or so countries.

Geiser, now a CFA charter-holder, is second to Reinford in terms of EMU-alumni longevity at SNL. Early in his career, he was building a lot of the financial models that leveraged the Excel application. Two years ago, he shifted into being the product manager for SNL’s MS Excel-based financial database and modeling application. “The application allows investment bankers, equity analysts, lenders, etc., to pump SNL’s data directly into Excel and populate their models,” says Geiser.

Enea Rrapokushi credits Reinford and Geiser for “establishing the reputation of EMU graduates at SNL.” Rrapokushi recalls a staff meeting in which SNL president and CEO Mike Chinn commented that if the entire workforce were as productive as the EMU graduates, the company would be 10 times more productive. Even if the compliment was overly generous, it reflects SNL’s receptiveness to hiring EMU alumni.

After being hired, EMU alumni have discovered they are able to rise quickly in the ranks of this fast-growing company, receiving as much responsibility as they can handle.

Isaac Wyse, for instance, joined SNL as an analyst in sales operations the summer after he graduated in 2010. A year and a half later, he was promoted to senior analyst. Today, at age 24, he is manager of sales operations, overseeing a group of a dozen (or so) analysts of all levels, both local and global. Among other responsibilities, his team develops the system used by sales and client services and builds reports and crunches numbers on both internal and client performance. “All of this is used to improve the quality of our outreach to our clients and to manage our internal teams,” he says.

Amina Auezova Shenk ’07, who majored in accounting rather than business administration at EMU, is a senior manager. “I am responsible for leading operations and process improvements to ensure profitable revenue growth,” she says. “I work with various sales and client-services department heads across the organization to improve inefficiencies and to help make sound and timely business decisions to drive short-term and long-term performance.”

Enea Rrapokushi ’07, a native of Albania, travels widely for SNL.

Braden Long ’08 started his post-collegiate career as an underwriter and risk manager with an insurance office in Charlottesville. In 2012, he moved to SNL to be an analyst. “It’s challenging work, and there is good variety on a day-to-day basis. In the morning when you come in, you can’t necessarily be sure what will be going on during the day.”

So, he is asked, one needs to be flexible to work at SNL? To this, Long laughs agreeably.

SNL’s international scope and flavor make it a good fit for Rrapokushi, born and raised in Albania. He came to the United States at age 18 as an exchange student at Central Christian, a Mennonite school in Kidron, Ohio. He was proficient in reading and writing English from his Albanian schooling, but struggled to comprehend American English, with its colloquialisms.

By the end of a year at Central Christian, though, he was a strong candidate for any U.S. college. EMU accepted him – he graduated in 2007 as a business administration major – and James Madison University granted him an MBA in 2012.

Employed by SNL since graduating from EMU, Rropokushi is now a senior content manager focused on the collection of metrics for the worldwide media and communications industry. He works with team members around the world, using video conferencing, emails, and lots of traveling, usually to India and Pakistan.

The pay at SNL? The alumni at SNL interviewed by Crossroads seemed more than satisfied, though none offered specifics. “SNL follows a very thorough pay-for-performance process where if you perform well you will be compensated more than if you don’t,” says Wyse. “It works out pretty well for those with a good work ethic and a desire to succeed.”  — Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04 

1. Initially, in 2003, SNL established an operation in Ahmedabad, India. Next, in 2005, in Islamabad, Pakistan – both locations likely chosen for the preponderance of highly educated English-speaking personnel who are adept with computers.

For information on employment at SNL, visit www.snl.com. Posted jobs in late March 2013 included copyediting, web design, marketing, sales, and software development, with 40 openings in Ahmedabad (India), 18 in Charlottesville, 15 in Islamabad (Pakistan), and 9 in Denver.

EMU accounting faculty: Marilla Melcher, Ronald Stoltzfus ’75, Leah Kratz ’00

EMU’s accounting students rank No. 2 in the state, behind the University of Virginia, for first-time pass rate on all sections of the Certified Public Accountant Exam, according to the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA).

EMU’s candidates passed the sections at a 72.2 percent rate, according to the 2011 NASBA Data and Trends Report, issued in 2012. The University of Virginia (UVa) had an 84.7 percent pass rate in the category of candidates without an advanced degree.

Close behind EMU were the students of James Madison University, with a 70.2 percent pass rate, and the University of Richmond with a 68.8 percent pass rate. Nationally, first-time candidates pass the sections at 49.8 percent. The average pass rate for all bachelor-degree-holding students in Virginia was 53.9 percent.

NASBA also reported that EMU ranks 18th in the nation in the “Very Small” category. This category includes 239 institutions with five to nine candidates taking the exam.

The accounting program at EMU is headed by Ronald L. Stoltzfus ’75, who holds a PhD in accounting and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). He has overseen the program since 1984. Other faculty members teaching accounting are Leah Kratz, a 2000 EMU grad who holds a CPA and MBA, and Marilla Melcher, with a CPA and an MS in accounting.

“The five graduates from EMU who took this exam in 2011 were a small group of test-takers compared to the test-groups of accounting graduates from much-larger universities in the state, such as Virginia Tech, James Madison, and William & Mary,” noted Stoltzfus. “But I don’t think our size diminishes our achievement. In fact, it may point to the advantages of the one-on-one attention that our students get.”

In a mark of accomplishment in 2012, a four-student EMU team competed against accounting teams from university programs around the United States in a contest sponsored by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). EMU made it into the final round of 20, from which three winners were chosen. AICPA judges ranked the EMU team, along with the other finalists, on its ability to present solutions in 1,000 words or less to the difficulties this nation faces with Social Security, the national deficit and taxes.

In the fall of 2010, EMU accounting majors also proved themselves in a regional competition. The EMU team tied for fourth place in the final round of competition with a team from UVa in the ninth annual Goodman & Company Accounting Challenge.

The team was one of 33 teams from colleges and universities from Virginia and Maryland. To advance to the final round, the EMU team completed two sets of grueling six-hour business exams. Another team from UVa finished first in the contest, followed by teams from William & Mary and James Madison.

To become licensed as a CPA, state licensing bodies typically require 150 hours of coursework. EMU graduates aiming for a CPA typically gain this coursework by enrolling in a master’s program. Over the last 10 years, their favorite next step has been James Madison University’s highly ranked MS program in accounting, but some students have enrolled in similar programs at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University-South Bend, among others.  — Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04

Jonathan Beckler ’07 // Audit senior, Cherry Bekaert LLP, Atlanta // Primarily works with healthcare clients to monitor their accounting and financial reporting practices. // When a client calls for advice, feels as if he’s broken a barrier, from disliked auditor to trusted partner.

“get best of both worlds”

One thing EMU recent accounting graduates often mention about the university’s accounting program is how they benefitted from its small size.

Ashley Hevener ’10 said the close, first-name relationship with her professors was a key part of the education that serves her well in her job as an auditor in Alexandria, Virginia, with Kearney & Company, a firm that focuses on federal agencies.

“EMU is doing a great job of preparing students to get the CPA certification,” said Jonathan Beckler ’07, now a senior accountant with Cherry Bekaert LLP in Atlanta, Georgia, echoing a sentiment expressed by many of his peers.

In nearly every state, though, the boards that regulate the accounting profession have adopted policies requiring CPA aspirants to have completed 150 collegiate credit hours – basically a year of academic credit beyond the usual four undergraduate years – before they can be licensed as a CPA, even if they pass the CPA exam.

Virginia adopted such a policy in 2005, meaning that accounting majors in the years since who want to become CPAs in Virginia – and pretty much any other state – have needed to continue their education at the graduate level.

Enter the master’s of accounting program at James Madison University (JMU), just across town from EMU. JMU has a 30-hour master’s program in accounting. EMU and JMU have formed a strong partnership in recent years, giving EMU accounting majors ready access to a one-year graduate program in Harrisonburg that gives them enough credit to sit for the CPA exam.

“Many of our students go to ‘finishing school’ at JMU,” says Ronald L. Stoltzfus ’75, PhD, head of the accounting program in EMU’s business and economics department. “We give them a good foundation, but our offerings are limited. JMU has the resources to offer graduate-level training in taxes, auditing and other aspects of accounting.”

Stoltzfus does recall one honors student, Eric Yoder ‘11, who chose not to enter graduate school and is now a CPA employed by Brown, Shultz, Sheridan and Fritz in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Yoder, however, came to EMU with 20 hours of college credit earned while in high school. This allowed him to take a few extra college courses and continue on to the CPA exam and licensing.

“All of the EMU students we have had in our program have been successes,” said Paul Copley, PhD, director of JMU’s School of Accounting. “They have been great in the classroom, have all found jobs, and have all passed the CPA exam. This is a testament to the quality of the undergraduate program at EMU.”

Besides his own JMU undergraduate pool, Copley says EMU is the only university from which his master’s program actively recruits candidates; each year one or two EMU graduates typically enroll. The master’s program at JMU allows students to specialize in taxation, audition or information systems.

While EMU’s small program size allows students to develop close, beneficial relationships with professors, being small also keeps it off the recruiting radars of large accounting firms. The fact that dozens of employers recruit from the graduate program at JMU – a public university with an enrollment of nearly 20,000 students – makes it an even more attractive option for EMU graduates looking for a first job opportunity.

“JMU has superior recruiting power for business and accounting students,” said Monte Glanzer ’07, who connected with his current employer, the accounting firm Hantzmon Wiebel in Charlottesville, Virginia, through one of his graduate professors at JMU.

As Copley puts it, the presence of JMU’s master’s program in Harrisonburg gives EMU accounting students access to the “best of both worlds.”

Beckler agreed, describing his undergraduate study at EMU as a great foundation on which the master’s program at JMU laid the finishing touches that prepared him for a career in accounting.  — Andrew Jenner ’04

Becky Holmes ’83 and Tammy Major Woods ’97

The “other” university in Harrisonburg, James Madison University, is now home to two number-crunching graduates of EMU, one directing JMU’s internal audit department and the other serving as associate budget director.

Becky Holmes ’83 came to visit EMU with some Mennonite friends from high school and decided she liked it so much that she graduated from EMU twice. In 1981 Holmes graduated with an associate’s degree in computer science, but the economy was slumped and jobs were scarce. So she went back to EMU for more learning. The second time Holmes graduated in 1983, it was with a major in accounting, a field with more opportunity.

Holmes began working as an internal auditor for James Madison University in 1987, after becoming a CPA and spending four years in public accounting. While working as an internal audit manager for NTELOS in the early 2000s, Holmes earned an MA in technical and scientific communication from JMU. She returned to JMU in 2004 as an auditor, and was promoted to the position of director of internal auditing in 2010.

“I look at processes,” she says. ” I pick an area of the university, then I look to make sure that it is efficient and complies with applicable policies and procedures, that it has appropriate controls in place.”

Beyond her career, Holmes credits EMU music professors John Fast and Kenneth J. Nafziger for nurturing her passion for music. “I was one of the original members of the EMU pep band,” she remembers. Today she is the pianist at her church, McGaheysville United Methodist.

Holmes sees a clear connection between her education at EMU and her work at JMU. “I got a sense of community [at EMU]. Community is part of the EMU tradition, and I can take that to another place like JMU.”

Tammy Major Woods ’97 came to Harrisonburg in 1987 and took a part-time temp job in the payroll office at JMU. “Twenty-six years later, I am still there.”

In between raising her two sons and climbing the ranks to the position of associate budget director, Woods managed to earn her bachelor’s degree in management and organizational development. She appreciated EMU’s Adult Degree Completion Program, where she interacted with other professionals who brought their adult work and life experiences into the classroom. “EMU gave me a foundation of confidence,” she says, “to later pursue a master’s of public administration from JMU.”

“The one area where EMU stands above other educational institutions I have been involved in,” she says, “is the cross-cultural experiences we shared. I spent time out in the community with people and cultures that are much different than my own.

“We immersed ourselves in their working environments, attended their religious ceremonies, and were even invited into their homes where they shared a meal with us.”

Ethical lessons rank at the top of Wood’s take-aways from EMU. “EMU helped build a foundation of integrity that is the basis on which I make decisions everyday,” she says.

Woods has been the treasurer of her church, Verona United Methodist, for over nine years. “This is the role that brings me the most personal satisfaction,” she says. “In this role I am able to use the knowledge, skills and abilities that God has given me to serve him and his church.” — Evan Knappenberger, class of 2014