Before graduating this spring, Kelly Doucette (MACCT ’14) had a few ideas about the kind of company she wanted to work for. Doucette’s time at the Freeman School taught her that when ethical challenges arise in the workplace, culture greatly influences how a company confronts those challenges. Finding her fit at a firm with a strong ethical foundation was a priority.
As the first recipient of the Freeman School’s Hansel O. Kincaid Graduate Accounting Fellowship, which requires students to submit an essay about ethics as part of their applications, Doucette says ethics was front of mind from the get-go.
“We talked about ethics all the time, whether it’s Enron, rules of independence for auditors, or learning how to look at a financial statement and analyze trends to identify when something isn’t right,” Doucette says.
Dorothy Kincaid created the fellowship in memory of her husband, Hansel O. Kincaid (BBA ’49), to reflect his lifelong values and principles. The couple met as volunteer attendance clerks at New Orleans’ First Baptist Church in the late 1940s and spent more than 50 years together endeavoring to build a Bible-based ethic into their lives and marriage. As a CPA, Mr. Kincaid made personal and professional ethics the hallmark of his long, successful practice.
While she didn’t know it at the time, Mrs. Kincaid’s vision for a fellowship dedicated to business ethics aligned perfectly with the vision of Freeman School Dean Ira Solomon, who had planned to further emphasize ethics in the business curriculum. Dean Solomon is currently working with faculty to develop an even more innovative and integrated approach to ethics, one that weaves more ethical analysis and coaching into coursework.
“I know what I’ve learned at Freeman will inform my decisions as I uphold my ethical responsibility in this next chapter,” says Doucette, who will join PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Boston in an auditing role this fall. “I am really grateful for Mrs. Kincaid’s generosity and that she highlighted this issue for me early on.”
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