Florida International University

Date: Jul 03 2015
Major: Accounting (This Major's Salary over time)
FIU has its pros and cons. In comparison to other schools across the nation, it's in the process of becoming a better school. President Rosenberg is doing a good job of expanding by building new parking lots and etc.

The accounting department is small, has limited resources and has many students as are part of their program. The department itself is often seem overwhelmed (possibly by some of the difficult professors / students they work with) and this rubs off sometimes on how they interact with students. To get anything done, you have to be good at making connections with people in the department. They are often unhelpful because many students walk in and expect to be spoonfed exactly how to do everything and they will insist you need to go online and figure it out for yourself. This is not necessarily a good thing and doesn't make the students feel welcome whatsoever, but this is often how they approach students.

Nearly all of the accounting classes are difficult. They are much more time-consuming and require enormous amounts of effort to do well in. They are not comparable to the level of difficulty of the general ed business courses.

Sometimes it seems that the accounting program is made exaggeratedly difficult for the students to maintain. It's an excellent program and you'll get a lot out of it if you were to actually apply yourself.

Average FIU students tend to lack ambition and don't know what they actually want with their lives yet (since they likely went from high school straight to college). Other people and family probably told them an accounting degree will help them earn a lot of money. As a result, the accounting program and the professors alike set higher standards in hopes that this will create better trained students that are capable of passing the CPA exam.

In actuality, what happens is that the students often feel that since the accounting courses are so difficult here, they are desperate to graduate. A lot of them stop caring about what kind of grades they end up getting. A good number of them don't even get into the process of studying for the CPA exam because they'd rather work and actually make money than take more time off from working to focus on it. I think this is more indicative of the students that go here rather than the department.

FIU often honks its own horn and says that their accounting program is top-notch and basically one of the best in the country. However, they don't have the numbers to prove this and they are aware of that. For instance, UF's accounting master's ranks in the top 20 in the nation and FIU's master program is at about 99. In addition to this, UF's accounting master's program also charges HALF of what FIU charges. That's right, half. Many of the accounting TA's complain and master's students complain about the ridiculous amount they are being charged for their master's degree. FIU compensates by buying Becker, buying dinner for their students, buying t-shirts, etc. Everyone still knows they are being charged too much and it's hard to feel pride for a school that does this to students (especially ones that understand money pretty well).

Students and professors are equally nice or helpful / arrogant and condescending depending on who you meet. This doesn't swing in any particular direction, it literally depends on who you meet.

Although FIU provides a great education for accounting, the truth is that accounting has become more of a "who you know" rather than "what you know" profession. Networking is more crucial for landing a job than grades are. The business clubs have public accounting companies come in every Friday to speak with students but those companies will not be eager to hire anyone unless they have actual accounting experience (such as an internship or work experience) or a leadership position on-campus. No one at FIU in the department or part of the clubs will tell you this (since they would not want to hurt anyone's feelings) but that's the cold-hard truth.

If you chose FIU due to it being a cost-efficient option, I would suggest to find other options carefully for the master's program that will not charge you as much money.