DR. KAREN OXNER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS:
I teach mostly accounting, some other business courses. I also teach corporate
strategy, as an example. I’m associate professor in the Department of Economics
and Business. I’m also chair.
I was raised in Little Rock, and went to college at the University of Arkansas
at Little Rock for my BS in Accounting and an MBA. While I was there, I was allowed
to teach a class in Principles of Accounting. I really liked it, but after I left
UALR I went to work in industry. I worked at a large public accounting firm, which
at the time was called Arthur Young. They've now been merged with another firm,
and the firm name is Ernst and Young.
But along the way I met and fell in love with my husband. He was an accounting
professor. I knew that our lifestyle as a married couple would be and a lot more
enjoyable if we had work schedules that were more the same, because public accounting
and internal auditing would both involve a lot of travel and overtime. I loved teaching
that year that I was in the MBA program at UALR, so after we were married I went
back to school at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale to get a DBA in Business
and completed that and was able to come to work at Hendrix and I've loved it ever
since.
Our program is fairly flexible and in terms of what students have to fulfill
for their degree. They have a number of choices to make, which is beneficial for
them because they can study the areas of economics or accounting that they're more
interested in rather than being in a very highly-structured program.
The background that they also get in the liberal arts in terms of humanities
and natural science and the other social sciences is of course helpful when they're
trying to understand a case study, maybe in business ethics, that they can draw
on some other philosophy classes for that. They will usually be exposed to more
writing assignments in all those liberal arts classes, which helps them when they
get to my corporate strategy class and they have to turn in a written case once
a week. They already know how to write well and get to the point and pull out the
pertinent facts and information. So a Hendrix business student graduates with a
much more well-rounded education than they would get at a state university.
Hendrix also offers a Master of Arts in accounting program which has been very
successful. The program was started about 15 years ago when Arkansas and many other
states started requiring the equivalent of five years of college in order to be
eligible to sit for the CPA exam. So our students stay for a fifth year and in just
one year they get their Masters of Arts in accounting whereas most MBA programs
might take two years.
The students in that program are very heavily recruited by both public accounting
and industry. Just this year, of the fourteen students in the program, twelve have
had job offers by December. They've gone on to work at companies like Windstream
and Stevens, Inc., which is the largest investment banking firm that's not headquartered
on Wall Street which is headquartered in Little Rock, Ark. We have several alumni
there. Employers really talk about how students that come from Hendrix have good
analytical skills they present themselves well to potentially the firm's clients
as well as their colleagues and they really value the well-roundedness that they
get here.