Waterloo grad is tops in CA exam

A recent graduate from the School of Accounting and Finance has won the national gold medal for the Chartered Accountancy Uniform Final Examination — sometimes described as the accountants’ equivalent of the well-known bar exam that turns students into lawyers.

It’s “one of the most challenging professional examinations in the world”, according to the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Vicky Au, who received her MAcc degree from Waterloo earlier this year (photo above), receives the prestigious Governor General’s Gold Medal and the Chartered Accountants’ cash prize of $5,000 for having the highest standing in Canada on the UFE.

The exam is described as a critical component of the CA qualification program, “a program that is unparalleled in its ability to prepare students for a career in business”. A national three-day evaluation, the UFE assesses CA candidate competencies including knowledge, professional judgment and ethics. The qualification program leading to a “CA” designation also includes a university degree requirement, a professional program of extensive course work, practical work experience and other examination requirements.

Au lives in Markham, Ontario, and is currently articling at Deloitte & Touche LLP in Toronto. She says her gold medal achievement “is a reflection of the people behind me, including my awesome UFE coach, my supportive family and friends, and my amazing study group. I definitely gave it my all, but it’s really been prayer and my faith that’s kept me going through the whole process. I have a lot to be thankful for.

“Since my first year at the University of Waterloo, I had always looked to the plaque on the school wall, honouring past gold medallists, and hoped that someday my name would be there too. It was a dream come true when I learned that I was this year’s medallist.”

She says Waterloo’s results on the UFE this year, including five out of the top 50 scorers, are “a reflection of the positive program and student government changes that are taking place. I hope our success this year inspires students to continue to aim for the top.” Au was also the winner of this year’s Faculty of Arts Alumni Gold Medal.

More than three thousand graduates from across the country successfully completed the UFE this year, including MAcc alumni and 14 Diploma in Accounting alumni from Waterloo’s accounting school. Dave Vert, Director of the MAcc and Diploma programs, extended congratulations to all the SAF graduates who achieved success on the UFE this year: “We have much to celebrate. SAF is currently in a period of significant growth in the enrolment in its programs, and we are very proud to see so many of our graduates achieving this career milestone.” Vert added, “The performance of our graduates on the UFE has seen notable improvement in each of the past three years, and the presence of Vicky and her fellow graduates on the UFE honour roll certainly represents the icing on the cake."

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What profs are doing on their sabbaticals

Here’s another list of Waterloo faculty members who are currently on sabbatical leave. All these sabbaticals began September 1, 2010, and are for twelve months unless otherwise noted. The plans that are quoted are from information submitted to the board of governors, which has to give approval for all sabbaticals.

En-hui Yang, electrical and computer engineering: “I intend to use the requested sabbatical leave to further push several research areas I initiated recently including interactive encoding and decoding for distributed communication and casual video coding.”

Wendi Adair, psychology: “The main focus of my sabbatical is writing scholarly articles from two recently completed large scale data collections on cross-cultural communication and the cultural mosaic in the workplace. In addition, I will be designing follow-up studies for one existing line of research on influence in negotiation and delving into a new line of research on trust and communication in negotiation.”

Yuying Li, computer science (six months): “Conduct research in optimal execution problems, which can lead to a better understanding of the mechanism whereby optimal execution strategies respond to more complex market information. Conduct research in highly dimensional multi-stage optimal decisions under uncertainty can potentially provide novel algorithms to obtain efficient computational solutions.”

Naomi Nishimura, computer science: “I will be physically located in Waterloo, splitting my time between independent and collaborative projects, both new and on-going, extending the reach and applicability of parameterized complexity to new problem domains and paradigms. Of particular interest are problems and paradigms that handle either changes to data over time or reconciliation of multiple, possibly inaccurate, views of data.”

Tamer Özsu, computer science (18 months): “During the sabbatical leave, I intend to re-generate my research program following 3.5 years as Director. I intend to visit two institutions (National University of Singapore and ETH Zurich) for extended periods of time to renew collaborations, and will be based in Waterloo the rest of the time.”

Scott Walbridge, civil and environmental engineering (six months): “Collaborate in a new research area with Dr. Bryan Adey at the Swiss Federal Technical University in Zurich (ETHZ), who is an accomplished expert in the field of infrastructure management. I will also use this leave to complete papers on my ongoing research in the following areas: fatigue of welded aluminum bridge components, modification of residual stresses to improve the fatigue performance of welds, and the assessment of corroding, weathering steel bridges.”

Janice Husted, health studies and gerontology: “I will focus on my research in the areas of gene-environment interactions in schizophrenia and psoriatic arthritis. This will involve travel to collaborate with colleagues at University of Toronto, Rutgers University and Cambridge University. I will continue to work with my graduate students, write several outstanding papers and submit a CIHR grant.”

Ihab Ilyas, computer science: “I will spend my sabbatical leave expanding the scope of my research in the two areas of ranking and probabilistic databases. I will stay in Waterloo, possibly arranging visits to universities or research labs.”

Prabhakar Ragde, computer science: “I will be based in Waterloo with short trips for collaboration and conferences. I will renew ongoing collaborations with researchers in North America and Europe in the areas of parameterized complexity and FPT algorithms, and explore new research opportunities in the theory and practice of programming languages.”

Jonathan Sykes, civil and environmental engineering: “The research focus of the planned sabbatical is the development and application of numerical models that can be used for the characterization and safety assessment of deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste including both used fuel and low and intermediate level waste. The leave will be spent based at Waterloo.”

CAR

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