I think people have the perception that accounting is dry but it doesn t have to be, says Carter, sitting in her sunny, shelf-lined office at Uris Hall. She has tried to show this in class by discussing such diverse topics as applying accounting to baseball and using real life examples of how companies cook the books. Carter is one of Columbia s newest professors, but if she looks more like a graduate student, that s because it wasn t that long ago that Carter was a graduate student. Joking that the ink is barely dry on the Ph.D. hanging on her office wall, Carter says she graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May and arrived in New York at the end of July to start preparing for her first classes as a professor this fall. While Carter had her choice of top universities to teach at, she was particularly drawn to Columbia because of its location in New York.
People talk about the New York advantage but it s really true.
It s easy for me to bring real world examples to class and when I need to do research, I have easy access to Wall Street analysts. Carter didn t set out to be a university professor. She was a senior associate when she decided to return to school to get her MBA at Boston College. She said her several of her professors at MIT s Sloan School of Management, who also taught at Harvard Business School, were great mentors. And colleagues at Columbia Business School have been invaluable showing her the ropes.