Easing stress and creating opportunity: The lifelong impact of donor support for scholarships
An accounting student’s story shows how financial aid from donors can help undergraduates focus on their studies and achieve the kind of success that fuels career readiness.
For aspiring professionals in accountancy, there’s no loftier ambition for starting a career than to land a job with one of the Big Four, the global service networks that handle accounting, auditing and more for most of the Fortune 500 companies and a vast array of smaller businesses, nonprofits and governmental agencies.
The biggest of the Big Four is Deloitte LLP, and that’s where Alizei De Leon, who holds a B.S. from San Diego State University’s Charles W. Lamden School of Accountancy, is scheduled to begin a full-time, entry-level position in October.
De Leon graduated this past May with minimal student debt partly thanks to assistance from three scholarships, all named for the generous donors who endowed them in order to help students in need.
“Going into college I knew that my parents would never be able to pay for it,” De Leon said in an interview conducted shortly before she graduated. “So I had to find my own ways.”
She wound up with a recurring $10,000-a-year scholarship from Weber Honors College, a Tanner and Aura Martin Endowed Scholarship for first-gen students in the Fowler College of Business, and a James E. Williamson and Francine J. Lipman Endowed Scholarship for students in the Lamden School of Accountancy.
“It is definitely such a refreshing feeling to know that there are people in the world who care to invest in our new students,” De Leon added, “to invest in the youth and our education.”
University leaders who work to raise private funding agree.
“Alizei's story perfectly illustrates why donor generosity is so vital,” said Adrienne Vargas, SDSU vice president for University Relations and Development.
“Scholarships allowed her to fully immerse herself in her education and prepare for a rigorous career path,” Vargas said. “This is how we ensure our graduates are not just degree-holders but truly career-ready professionals who will make an impact."
Originally from the Bay Area, De Leon was active with the Asian Pacific Student Alliance at SDSU “since literally Day One,” she said, having heard about the organization during orientation. She made friends there, made connections and eventually was elected president.
She also got a part-time job at the SDSU Cal Coast Student Financial Center, a position she sought out “to be able to help students who are just like me.” She has continued to work there over the summer.
Lecturer Jim Vogt saw De Leon in his spring 2024 Reporting Techniques (ACCTG 390W) class. He noticed her flair and confidence in one of the field’s most highly valued job qualifications: communication in a business setting. The course focuses upon writing and presentation skills for complex accounting topics, something Vogt said is important because “it doesn’t matter if you’re an expert if you can’t express your thoughts and ideas to non-accountants in a way that they can understand.”
“My impression of Alizei was always that she carried herself very well,” said Vogt, a certified fraud examiner in his previous career in banking. “She expressed herself well, which is what that course was all about. She had that really good balance of understanding the accounting concepts and being able to communicate them to others in an effective way.”
De Leon previously worked at Deloitte as an intern. Now hired into its San Francisco office, she expects tasks such as reviewing and documenting audit control procedures, analyzing and calculating financial statements, and a task called file cleanups.
De Leon took her scholarship application process quite seriously and was assisted by SDSU’s Aztec Scholarships. After loading all of her scholarship essays into a Google Doc, she found she had submitted some 30,000 words ― about the length of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
Sounds like an awful lot, but De Leon said it was a useful exercise, having to think about “how do I present myself in a way that will make these donors think that investing in me is really going to be worth it.”
Just as importantly, however, she said the scholarships gave her the ability to “stay afloat, pay my bills” and work only part-time over the summer while she studies for her CPA exam, an all-important stepping stone to getting licensed in the profession.
”It is so refreshing to see people have such an act of selflessness,” De Leon said. “You’re putting this money into your community. You’re putting faith into these students. To really invest in us, to believe in us, and I think that’s such a wonderful and refreshing thing to see.”
Tammy Blackburn, University Relations and Development, contributed to this article.
