[New Professor Special] 'Make hay while the sun shines' Take advantage of this opportunity <Professor Choi Ah-reum>
- bizskk
- Hit368
- 2022-12-14
Our college of Business is strengthening its core values of education and research, and is striving to nurture talents for student success and future value creation. To this end, new teacher was appointed in the second semester of the 2022 school year, her major was accounting, and she was invited to be teacher with excellent competence in each field. This time, we met Professor 'Choi Ah-reum' of <Accounting Major>, a new teacher who became a family member of business school, and listened to 'major research activities, majors, and future plans'
Q1. Hello, professor. Nice to meet you like this! Please introduce yourself.
Hello, I am Choi Ah-reum, who was appointed as an accounting major in the Department of Global Business Administration at Sungkyunkwan University in the second semester of 2022. I worked at Hong Kong Baptist University for 6 years after I received my Ph.D. in Accounting(Accounting Audit) major and came to Sungkyunkwan University this semseter. It's nice to meet you all.
Q2. Please briefly introduce your major, and what made you choose your major?
I majored in accounting within business administration. Companies disclose their financial status and financial performance through the form of financial statements and communicate with various stakeholders based on them, and related subjects are accounting. I had the opportunity to take classes in various major subjects when I was undergraduate, and there was a class that changed my stereotype that I thought accounting was a rather boring and technical subject. It was a class on financial statements analysis and corporate value evaluation. In this class, I learned to understand and evaluate companies through financial statements, and I continued to study accounting because I was interested in it.
Unfortunately, I often read articles that accounting jobs may be replaced by AI in the future. However, I think this is a judgement based on only looking at a part of the accounting. The simple, repetitive task that occur in the process of preparing financial statements can be replaced to some extent. However, since accounting includes both interpreting financial statements and making strategic interpretations and judgments based on them, I think human roles in accounting area will still be important eve with the advent of the AI era.
Q3. Please tell us how you feel about starting anew at Sungkyunkwan Universtiy's Business School and your future plans.
First of all, I am very happy to have a new start at Sungkyunkwan University. It's only been a week since I went to school, but I'm building good memories every day. In the meantime, it has been difficult to interact with people due to COIVD-19, but I want to communicate with people a lot in the future as COVID-10 is more eased.
Q4. Please briefly introduce your class.
This semester, I was in charge of a seminar on accounting principles for undergraduate classes and audit for graduate classes. Accounting principles are the most basic subject of accounting, and we plan to deal with how to prepare financial statements and interpret them. As I did my first undergraduate class, I was able to meet students of various nationalities, so I hope it will be a more interesting class. Graduate school class is a class where you read and discuss papers related to audit. Are large accounting firms better? What efforts can regulators make to improve audit quality? What changes will the new external audit law, which was recently introduced in Korea, bring about? How does AI change the role of auditors? We are going to cover a variety of topics such as that.
Q5. What is your future research plan?
There are various research fields within accounting, and I have mainly done research related to audit. The auditor's role is to verify that the financial statements prepared by the company are well prepared according to accounting standards. I am researching whether the auditor's original role is doing well, in which circumstances the auditor's role becomes more important, and what environment the auditor should be supported to play a more important role in the capital market, and I will continue to study this.
In addition, we plan to continue to expand our research area by combining corporate social responsibility with accounting, which has recently been emphasized. When talking about a company's performance, it used to focus only on financial performance, but recently it has also emphasized a lot of non-financial performance. Following this trend, many companies are publishing reports on corporate social responsibility, and we plan to study what role auditors can play to improve the quality of the report and what information is useful in this report.
Q6. Please tell us about the ideal educator you think.
I think it's very difficult to express in one word what an ideal educator is. There are various perspective on ideal educators, but I would like to focus on the fact that my primary teaching audience is university students. When I think about when I was a college student, I think I had a lot of worries about the future. I thought a lot about what I liked or could do well, but I didn't know how to solve these problems. So I want to share with my students that there are more possibilities and opportunities while thinking about the future(I will also emphasize that accounting is important for more possibilities and opportunities). I'm still lacking a lot, but I'll constantly think about the ideal educator.
Q7. If you have anything you want to say to students who are studying hard at Sungkyunkwan University's Business School, please tell them!
First of all, it's nice to meet you at Sungkyunkwan University. You have to study hard while living in school, but I think it's also important to find various opportunities and experience them yourself if possible. I like the expression 'Make hay while the sun shine'. It means to make it your own when the opportunity comes, but I think you should be well prepared in order to do this. In the future, endless growth possibilities will unfold in front of us, and I hope you have a fruitful university life so that you can prepare well and achieve them. Please feel free to let me know if there is anything I can do help you in the process.