It takes a lot of patience to be Mary Ann Hofmann. Every year on April 15, the Andrews University associate professor of accounting is bombarded with distraught students who can’t make sense of their tax return forms. "My phone rings from morning to night," she says. She takes it with good humor though. "It’s fun, and I always plan for it. I know I’m not going to get anything else done!"

When Hofmann was starting college, she did not see accounting in her future. Quite to the contrary, she wanted to become a veterinarian. "I sort of fell into accounting more by accident than by design!" she said. With more and more experience in college, she decided to switch to studying business. "Accounting kind of appealed to me," she said. Teaching was also something that interested Hofmann, and the fusion of her two interests put her on the road to teaching accounting.

It was in 1991, while teaching at Andrews, that Hofmann decided to take the Certified Management Accountants exam. She felt it was a good thing to do since she was teaching classes in cost and managerial accounting. When the results for the exam came back, she received a gold medal for having received the highest score nationwide. "I think I was as shocked as anyone when I found out that I had gotten the highest score!" said Hofmann.

In her classes, she stresses to her students that they always should strive for excellence: "Mediocrity is never good enough," she says. Also, in a fast-changing area such as accounting, education never ends. Most importantly, she says that, "Careers and money are secondary to your relationship with God. The true measure of success is not measured in dollar signs." With the recent scandals in the accounting world, Hofmann tells her students to decide in their own hearts where their own ethical boundaries lie, and then they have to be true to that.

Grounded in solid accounting principles and a Christian sense of ethics, how can her students go wrong?

Bjorn Karlman, student news writer