College of Business: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Elijah Watt Sells Awards Noted


1/27/2006

The Fall 2005 issue of AICPA’s The Uniform CPA Examination Alert announced the 2004 Elijah Watt Sells awards. Two of the nine recipients mentioned were from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities to have two awardees.

The Elijah Watt Sells award program was established by the AICPA in 1923 to recognize outstanding performance on the Uniform CPA Examination. More than eighty years later, Sells awards continue to be presented to candidates who earn the highest cumulative examination scores. (Information about the program and its history is available at www.cpa-exam.org.)

Under the current criteria, ten Sells awards are granted annually to candidates who completed testing during the previous year and passed all four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination on their first attempt, earning the highest cumulative scores. The Sells awards for 2004 recognize the ten highest score recipients out of more than 50,000 examinees.

Congratulations to the following MSA students who were recipients of the 2004 Sells Award:

Xin (Amanda) Yuan earned an MS in Accounting from Illinois in 2004 and an undergraduate degree in International Finance from Xiamen University in 1997. She has been working as an Internal Auditor at Lucent Technologies for the past year. Her future plans include acquiring public accounting experience and an MBA degree.

Yan Zhang was awarded an MS in Accounting Illinois in 2004 and an undergraduate degree from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China in 1998. She is currently working as a hedge fund accountant at DPM Mellon in New Jersey. After acquiring more experience, she hopes to open her own accounting firm.

UIUC College of Business