Why did I become an Accountant? – The biggest Abbey Inspires of the year
8th December 23
On Friday 17th November, we held a special Abbey Inspires Event ‘Why I became an Accountant?’ and invited staff and alumni to share their experiences. Here is an account of the event written by student journalist Denise in Year 11.
If you have seen the posters all around the school about the accounting Abbey Inspires, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the biggest Abbey Inspires of the year, I’m talking about how it has to be conducted in the hall due to its popularity, and most importantly, I’m talking about how students love it so much that they wanted this to be a weekly event!
Before even stepping into the hall, a counter full of candies caught my eye. Everyone who joined the Abbey Inspires can get as much candy as they want for free! Yes, you heard right, for FREE!
If I had to use only one word to describe the whole talk, I would say “engaging”. Stuart made sure that everyone found the presentation fun as well as informative, and from my observation, no one felt bored for even one second during the whole talk! Stuart shared his experience in accountancy and gave us some insights into what being an accountant is like. Students were also blessed with Stuart’s ‘handsome’ photographs and fun little episodes back in the day. (Well, at least I enjoyed it, especially knowing that Stuart even worked in Rolls Royce before!)
Just when everyone was feeling a bit bored from all those ancient stories (sorry Stuart), the spotlight of the day, our alumni, Ethan, went up on stage and shared his journey in Abbey College Cambridge and now in LSE. We got to know about how university life will be, and what we should expect in the future. He exposed some behind-the-scenes moments when he was studying in Abbey, and we had a good laugh about it. (Playing Switch in Stuart’s lesson?!)
And let’s not forget about the lucky draw session after the talk, where I was lucky enough to get picked and get a Christmas edition chocolate bear from Stuart. (I’m keeping it as a souvenir, fyi.)
After the Abbey Inspires, we had a chance to interview Stuart. According to what he has told us, this is the third year he has done this Abbey Inspires, and every year he wants to make it bigger and better, just like what he always says, “Either go big or go home.” Also, Stuart hopes that students will treat accounting as an option for their future job planning, or even just to “open their eyes”. He mentioned that it is a lot of hard work to organise this event, but he believed that it is very important to have some fun on a Friday night as it has been a very hard term for the abbey community.
And yes, we did manage to interview Ethan, but we had to wait for literally 20 minutes for it to happen as he was surrounded by his fans. (Not complaining, just spitting facts.) He thought that it’d be nice to share his experience from Abbey to LSE, and how Abbey actually gives a lot of help and support to students compared to universities. Ethan also mentioned that studying economics in A-levels gives you an advantage in studying accounting, as you’ll still have to study economics modules in university. He is now considering getting into investment banking in the future, but he doesn’t expect to be working in that field for more than 10 years, as he believes that’s when people burn themselves out.
We also asked Ethan to give us a quote(he gave us two), and we’ll end this article with his quotes.
“Listen to Stuart” and the famous quote from Stuart, “I don’t know.”
