The Paton Center Strives to Enhance Collaboration and Support Accounting Students and Faculty

Located on the third floor of the Ross Building, the Paton Center for Research in Accounting is the Michigan Ross hub for accounting research, fundraising, and scholarship. The center’s primary focus is maintaining connections with alums and donors and raising funds to support accounting programs, faculty, and scholarships for current and prospective accounting students.

“We raise funds to support students’ education, and every student who gets a chance to have an education that they couldn’t have afforded otherwise changes the world,” said Greg Miller, faculty director of the Paton Center. “And by building a base of informed, skilled people, all of us can move forward together in a better way.”

Supporting programs and building community

The Paton Center team is comprised of Faculty Director Greg Miller and Coordinator Tara Start. Together, they work to elevate the accounting community at Michigan Ross through fundraising, supporting the events and initiatives of the Master of Accounting and Accounting PhD Program teams, and faculty research.

“We view accounting at the University of Michigan to be a community, and fostering that community includes attracting new students into it, building relationships with our alums, and developing excellent academics who are both teachers and great researchers,” said Miller.

The Paton Center collaborates especially closely with MAcc and helps MAcc maintain relationships with recruiters and alums. For example, this past year, the center helped launch the MAcc Mentorship Program to create professional development opportunities for incoming MAcc students by matching them with MAcc alumni mentors based on their areas of interest. The center also co-hosted an MAcc Alumni Tailgate and Mentorship Kick-Off event this year before the football game against Michigan State. That event brought together over 150 alums, current students, faculty, and staff for networking and to build relationships. 

Additionally, the center helps to support the MAcc and Accounting PhD fundraising efforts. Each year, the center produces an annual report that is sent to all donors and accounting alums. The report includes student stories, important research, and updates from the center and accounting academic program teams to keep donors and alums engaged with the community. 

Moreover, the Paton Center hosts the Harvey E. Kapnick Accounting Conference each year to foster collaboration between Michigan Ross faculty and researchers from other schools. The conference brings together top academics to share their research on accounting topics and inspire dialogue. Every third year, the center hosts this conference on a larger scale, inviting alums and donors to participate and engage with the accounting community.

Expanding student engagement and collaboration

Besides supporting the current accounting community at Ross, the center also puts great emphasis on attracting new students through its namesake Paton Fellow Scholarship Program. As part of this program, U-M students who are selected as Paton Fellows receive a stipend for buying textbooks. Most are still uncertain of their careers at the time they apply; however, through the support of the Paton Fellow Program, they are able to learn more about the field of accounting in order to consider it as a career path. Additionally, fellows who apply and are admitted to the Ross Master of Accounting Program with a GPA of 3.5 or higher can receive scholarship benefits from the center upon admission.

According to Miller and Start, while the Paton Center’s primary focus is to support students behind the scenes through scholarships and raising funds to support faculty research and initiatives, the team is making an effort to collaborate more broadly and provide co-curricular experiences for students as well.

“Traditionally, our center has not been student-facing – it’s been about raising funds to help students attend and raising funds to help faculty be better at teaching and doing research,” said Miller. “Given that we’re so small, one way for us to try to do some student-facing work would be to team up with other units and say, ‘Can we do something together?’”

In order to better serve students, the Paton Center recently partnered with the BBA Program to be part of their new student orientation. They are also hoping to partner with other centers and institutes to bring in more speakers and plan student events. For that reason, Miller would encourage any faculty or staff who would like to add an accounting perspective to their programming to reach out and collaborate. He would also encourage faculty and staff to attend the upcoming Paton Fellow Induction Ceremony in April to learn more about the center and the students it supports.

“While we’re maintaining our accounting community, it is also important for us to be part of the Ross community,” said Miller. “In the end, the goal of accounting is to reflect the business so we all can make better decisions. That means good accountants need to understand their entire community, not just the views of other accountants.”