Dear MAC Alumni,

It has been a while since I’ve written to you – we have been very busy with admissions for the MAC Class of 2009.  It has definitely been an exciting time!  Our goal for this season was to have approximately 90 students enter our MAC Class of 2009 (same as last year), and our 3-5 year goal is to increase the size of the program to 120 students.  Obviously, we need more faculty to accomplish any growth in the program – we are working on that!

Almost 250 prospective students applied to the program by the March 1st deadline – an increase of 10% over last year (which was a record itself)!  We accepted 110 of these applicants.  So far, we have had 16 students decline, and 81 students have indicated they will be attending our MAC Program in the Class of 2008.  We are just waiting to see what the remaining 13 will decide – most of them should make a decision within the next week.  I would like to thank the many of you who made phone calls to targeted prospective students – you were a great influence on them, and definitely helped to sway their decisions to attend NC State.  We would like to expand the number of alumni involved next year.

Some stats on the 94 potential students in the new class: their average GPA is 3.51 and their average GMAT is 589.  There are 46 students from NC State and the remaining 48 students come from 34 other universities.

We are planning to have 17 fellows in the current class - nine out-of-state applicants and eight in-state.  We are very lucky to have five Academic Fellows and one fellow who was pre-placed with Cherry Bekaert & Holland.  The remaining 11 fellows candidates interviewed on campus March 13th and 14th.  We only had 16 fellows last year (nine out-of-state and seven in-state), and I’m thrilled we were able to recruit such high-quality individuals.

We included a panel of four MAC alumni in our New MAC Student Advising session on Friday, March 14th.  They talked about different service lines in public accounting.  Many thanks to Hunter Lane (Class of 2007, Deloitte – Tax), Amy Wu (Class of 2004, McGlardey – Risk Advisory Services), Sarah Murphy (Class of 2007, PwC – Core Audit), and Beth Bemisderfer (Class of 2007, E&Y – IT Audit) for representing the MAC alumni and the accounting profession so well! 

We will also include a discussion of service lines by MAC alumni in our MAC Orientation activities in August – in addition to a panel of alumni discussing the transition from school to work.  If you are interested in participating on either of these panels, please let me know!

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