Jennifer Hayton, the Canadian gold medalist in the 2006 Uniform Final Examination that new accountants must pass, talks with UW students in the accountancy "Living-Learning Community" during a visit in Village I last week. Hayton, now with KPMG in Waterloo, was joined by Mary Anne Lavallee, a UW graduate who passed the UFE in 2005, to tell students about the experience of becoming a chartered accountant.

Future accounting students are due

from the UW school of accountancy

The School of Accountancy will be holding the final sitting of the Accounting and Financial Management Admissions Assignment (AFMAA) tomorrow as part of its new admission process for fall 2007. It's the first and only professional school of its kind to implement this unique admissions tool for use in considering applicants for an accounting or financial management program.

The purpose is to ensure that every applicant to the Accounting and Financial Management program is evaluated on an individual basis, and to identify those who have the potential for developing the skills and characteristics sought by employers in co-op students and graduates. The AFMAA is a two-hour essay assignment, written under supervision. This exercise is helping the school to assess each applicant’s teamwork, leadership, communication and analytical skills, and to admit strong, well-rounded students who have the qualities needed to succeed in the AFM program and the profession.

Some 600 selected students have been invited to write the AFMAA at UW, at the University of British Columbia, or on their own with an individual supervisor. In conjunction with the writing of the AFMAA in Waterloo, the school will be holding a mini-recruitment event for prospective AFM students and their parents, to provide them with information about the benefits of studying Accounting and Financial Management at UW. Parent sessions on AFM-specific co-op, scholarships and fellowships and our unique Living-Learning Community will be offered during the writing of the AFMAA. AFM representatives, students and staff will also be on hand during the day to answer questions from applicants and parents.

“I’m very excited about the potential outcome of the AFMAA," says Grant Russell, director of the AFM program. "This new admissions tool allows a broader range of qualified students the chance to showcase their attributes and personal achievement, and prove that they possess the characteristics necessary to succeed in the AFM program and eventually become leaders in their chosen fields." The first sitting of the AFMAA was held on February 17 and resulted in approximately 300 early offers of admission for the most outstanding AFM candidates.

The UW accountancy school offers five undergraduate and three graduate programs emphasizing the technical, analytical, evaluative, and communication skills needed to prepare for careers in public accounting, industry, government and not-for-profit sectors. All undergraduate programs are co-op only, and four of the five programs are available as part of a five-year course of study leading to an MAcc degree.

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'She loves me' — good for the ego

from the UW media relations office

People with low self-esteem can help themselves by thoroughly reviewing and taking to heart any compliments from their loved ones, a study by a UW psychology graduate student says. Denise Marigold explains that people with low self-esteem tend to doubt how much their romantic partners love and value them. One way to counter that is for them to describe or reframe praise from their partners in an abstract manner, explaining why their partners admired them and what the compliments meant to them.

"The novel aspect of our approach is that it helps people with low self-esteem to help themselves," Marigold says. "It may be empowering for them to learn how to meaningfully reframe their partners' affirmations in order to assuage their doubts about their partners' love for them."

Previous research has shown they underestimate how much they are actually loved by their partners. "These unwarranted insecurities can have very negative consequences for their relationships," Marigold says.

When feeling particularly insecure about their partners' love, people with low self-esteem protect themselves by devaluing their relationships and keeping their partners at a distance. "Over time, these defensive behaviours tarnish their partners' rosy views and ultimately undermine the well-being of the relationship."

While it might be assumed that being told by their partners how much they are loved could reduce the insecurities of people with low self-esteem, past research indicates they react unfavourably to direct positive feedback. In fact, compliments seem to heighten their self-doubts, leading them to worry that they cannot live up to such a positive self-image. "They feel that they will eventually be rejected when the 'truth' is revealed," Marigold says. "In the current research, we sought to find a way to increase their sense of relationship security by highlighting their valued qualities in a manner that circumvented the activation of self-doubts."

As part of the research, undergraduate participants recalled a compliment that they had recently received from their current romantic partner. People with low self-esteem typically viewed these compliments as relatively isolated, past events that did not meaningfully indicate how much they were valued more generally.

Participants were then asked to describe the compliment in an abstract fashion. In other words, they explained why their partner admired them, what the compliment meant to them and what significance it had for their relationship. When people with low self-esteem described a past compliment from their partner in an abstract manner, compared with participants who were not asked to use an abstract description, they reported increased positive feelings and thoughts related to the compliment. These positive feelings, in turn, raised their currently reported level of self-esteem, their feelings of security in their partners' acceptance and their relationship satisfaction.

Importantly, the cognitive reframing of the compliment had lasting effects. Two to three weeks later, they continued to feel more secure and positive about their relationship in general and even perceived their partner as behaving more positively toward them.

"On the basis of our research, we suggest that it would not be sufficient to encourage partners of people with low self-esteem to increase their frequency of giving compliments, because low self-esteem individuals tend not to take compliments to heart," Marigold says. As well, partners of people with low self-esteem might find it frustrating and tiring to make more effort to reassure them with praise. "Rather, people with low self-esteem should be encouraged to abstractly frame and generalize from their partners' compliments," she says.

Marigold's research was published in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Her faculty supervisors are John Holmes and Mike Ross.

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Here in honk-if-you-love-geese land

We're just a week into the winter term exam period, and if you're enrolled in Anthro 101, Chemistry 237L, or Health/Kin 210, this Friday the Thirteenth is your lucky day. Unofficial grades will start appearing on Quest on April 22, the day after the exam period ends, the registrar's office says; grades become official as of May 22.While exams continue, food services is providing sustenance around the clock — the 24-hour-a-day schedule lasts until Monday midnight at Mudie's cafeteria in Village I, and until April 20 at Tim Hortons in the Student Life Centre. The Davis Centre library is also open 24 hours (except 2 to 8 a.m. on Sunday), while the Dana Porter Library is open 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily through the exam period.

Most of the co-op students who are moving from classes and exams into spring term job have known for some time where they'll be working — most, but not all. Weekly "cycles" of co-op interviews, rankings and matches have been continuing in the Tatham Centre and on JobMine, to slot as many of those students as possible into jobs, and this week's cycle was the last. "Job postings continue daily until the end of June for those students still without employment for the May-August work term," a memo from the co-op department says. "Interviews from this point will most likely be arranged off campus between employers and students."

The finance office has sent out another memo reminding departments that the end of the 2006-07 fiscal year is approaching, with all its implications for getting financial transactions settled and accounts balanced. "Please take the following necessary steps to ensure all requests for accounting transactions and payments are submitted to Finance as soon as possible," writes director Jane Manson, mentioning an April 30 deadline for internal billings. She says departments should send in, "without delay", such things as travel claims, faculty professional expense claims, and invoices from vendors. "Preliminary year-end statements will be sent electronically through FORE on May 7," she says, and the last transactions for the ending year have to be received by May 11. Questions: the number to call is ext. 3–3724.

Programming for residents of Columbia Lake Village is nothing if not diverse, and a recent addition, the CLV newsletter reveals, is a "New Moms" playgroup, aimed at "parents who are expecting or are new parents of a child 0-5 years old". The group "provides new parents in the community an opportunity to socially get together and for the children to interact with one another. The group provides friendship, fun and support." It meets every Saturday, 12:30 p.m., at the CLV community centre.

The UW bookstore is now taking online orders for Ken McLaughlin's 50th anniversary history of UW, to be published later this month. • Maintenance by Atria Networks, which provides computer connections to UW's off-campus sites in Kitchener and Cambridge, is expected to cause "several interruptions" in service to those nodes between midnight and 6 a.m. this Sunday. • If you think this weather is chilly for April, you can perhaps take comfort in the UW weather station's calculation that the average daily high during March was 4.0 Celsius.

CAR

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