Accounting isn’t as hard, nerdy as you might think
COMMENTARY
Christopher Suffron

I am an accounting major, and when I tell people this I usually get one of two responses. I either get a look of disappointment and an “oh, really” or an “I could never do that.” Such reactions stem from two myths about accountants that can be seen in American culture: accountants are boring nerds and accounting is a difficult subject to grasp.

The generic image of an accountant is a guy wearing thick, black-framed glasses and a short-sleeved white shirt with a thin black tie talking about stuff way over everyone’s head. A calculator is usually somewhere on his person and he has a dorky haircut. Therefore, when people hear that I am an accounting major, that image pops into their mind and I am immediately labeled “Dorky Numbers Guy.”

This is not fair because I am nothing like that guy. Okay, I might have a bad haircut, but I don’t even own a black tie or short-sleeved white shirt. The truth is none of the accountants I have met fit into that mold. Well, maybe that one guy.

However, I cannot get people to think accountants aren’t nerds because the truth is we probably are. What I do want to do is convince you that the subject of accounting is not nearly as difficult to grasp as people make it out to be. As a matter of fact, accounting has to be one of the easiest fields of study to understand.
Those people who have taken accounting classes are probably telling me that I am crazy right now, but I want you to think about something for a moment. What do the other subjects like math, science, sociology, economics and education have in common that accounting does not? The answer is that they attempt to understand how or why a particular event occurs or thing works the way it does. And these things, whether they are natural phenomena or human behavior, are not exclusively determined by man.

On the other hand, accounting is simply a bunch of rules that a group of people made up in order to make sense out of business transactions. These rules are not even that complicated. The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are essentially just a few basic principles on financial reporting taken to their logical ends. Truthfully, I probably could have come up with most, if not all, of the rules that exist today myself.

So what do think is easier to understand, the mind of God or the minds of a group of people of average to slightly above average intelligence that like to make rules?

I do not want to make people who cannot understand accounting feel stupid, because you are not. I have plenty of friends, intelligent friends, who just cannot seem to grasp the subject. I just do not understand what it is about accounting that drives people to study for five days before a test and still not do particularly well on it. Although I would like to think so, I cannot possibly be that much smarter than everyone else.

Christopher Suffron is a senior accounting major from League City.