Honolulu: "City budget proposal to be available online"

According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser's B.J. Reyes, Mayor Peter Carlisle is making the city budget available to the public:


With the first budget of his administration, Mayor Peter Carlisle is offering the public -- number crunchers, spreadsheet devotees and open-government advocates alike -- a chance to examine the figures and come up with ideas he might have overlooked.

...

The entire operating budget for the city and county will be available to the public, as will the budget for the soon-to-be-formed Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit. Financial disclosure forms for Carlisle and his Cabinet already are posted.

"We'll provide an opportunity for the citizen to review this data and provide comment back to us that we will forward on to the appropriate parties to then look at ways that we may be able to save money, reduce costs and come up with any other ideas that we possibly missed," [city Information Technology Director Gordon] Bruce said. "I'm sure we'll come up with some great ideas."

Hopefully this increased transparency will help Honolulu improve its operations, budget allocation, and spending. It will be interesting to see what kind of responses the city will get - as well as what kind of action (if any) they take after hearing suggestions from the public.

Beta Alpha Psi Regional Conference

I recently attended the Beta Alpha Psi Regional Conference in Anaheim, CA, which opened my eyes to the difference between career opportunities in Los Angeles and career opportunities in Honolulu - at least in the accounting field.

Beta Alpha Psi is an honorary accounting organization, and most universities with established accounting programs have a chapter of Beta Alpha Psi represented on their campus. This year, the University of Southern California (USC) Beta Alpha Psi chapter hosted the regional conference, and I volunteered at the event. I met the three representatives of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UH) Beta Alpha Psi chapter and learned more about what recruiting is like back home in Honolulu.

The three representatives from UH's Beta Alpha Psi were all seniors, but they were still in the process of recruiting for full-time positions. I heard that some of the main public accounting firms are not even hiring for full-time this year because they do not have positions available. Others are offering around two full-time positions. Learning about the shortage of available positions made me realize how difficult it must be for graduates to find a job back home. Graduates from the UH accounting program are all competing for those few positions, and there are also graduates from mainland colleges applying to work back home.

If only a handful of graduates secure a full-time position with the larger accounting firms in Honolulu, it makes me wonder what everyone else will do after graduation... Perhaps more people back home go into private industry working in the accounting departments of companies. Or maybe proportionately more of them work at small, local accounting firms.

In any case, I am very grateful for the number of job opportunities available in LA. Almost all of my classmates at the USC Leventhal School of Accounting have secured internships for this summer, which will usually turn into full-time offers by the beginning of senior year. With each of the Big 4 (Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC) hiring 30+ interns every year, our chances of securing internships and full-time positions are so much greater.

I guess, in this sense, I am glad that I chose to stay up in LA to start my career...

Sophomores start the recruiting process for accounting internships in LA

Tonight was the USC Leventhal School of Accounting's Spring 2011 Meet the Firms at the California Science Center. Meet the Firms is the biggest recruiting event for accounting students held each semester, where almost all of the accounting firms in Los Angeles bring their recruiters and professionals to network with USC's accounting students.

This semester's Meet the Firms was the first time I was not recruiting, since most of us juniors have already secured our summer internships. All the focus of recruiting this spring will be on the sophomores, who are starting their recruiting for internships for Summer 2012. In order to recruit for next summer's internship, they are encouraged to start by recruiting for this summer's summer leadership programs, which are held by all of the Big 4, as well as several mid-tier firms.

Because the recruiting timeline has changed dramatically in LA, it is even more crucial for sophomores to begin recruiting now. By the end of next semester (Fall 2011), they will have (hopefully/probably) secured their internships for the following summer. This means that if they do not start recruiting now, they will have to cram everything into next semester - learning more about the accounting career, meeting professionals from all the different firms, figuring out which firms they like best, and then applying and interviewing (2 rounds) for the firms. And do not forget that they will still have to balance the hundreds of recruiting dinners/lunches/socials with schoolwork and other involvement...

If they do not start learning about the different firms now and establishing relationships with the professionals and recruiters, it will be very hard for them to decipher which firm they want to start their career at - which is essentially what we decide when we choose where to do our summer internship, since that will translate into a full-time offer (about 95% of the time, or so the recruiters say).

The sophomores who are on top of their game and already interviewing for the summer leadership programs have a huge advantage because the recruiting attention is all on them. For those sophomores who are on the regular path and have not yet learned about the recruiting process for accounting, it will be a very difficult fall semester.

Friday, February 4th - A Big Day for the Big 4 in LA

Today was the deadline for intern candidates to return their signed offer letters and decide which Big 4 accounting firm they want to work for in Los Angeles this summer. It is amazing to think that we juniors are just about set in terms of starting our careers; we no longer need to worry about having a job when we graduate, since this summer internship will turn into a full-time position, unless something significant goes wrong during the internship.

One interesting thing is that there are six students from Hawai'i in our accounting class (graduating May 2012). This is an unusually high number of students from Hawai'i in the same accounting class at the same university. (Although there are a lot of students from Hawa'i at USC, there are usually maybe only a couple of people who decide to do accounting each year.) Five of us six decided to stay in LA to start our careers. All five of us ended up going to the same firm in the same practice.

The coincidence of all five of us starting at the same firm was just something interesting I wanted to point out; the more notable statistic is that five of the six students from Hawai'i will be working in LA - not returning home to work in Hawai'i.

Hawai'i is losing so much of its talent to the mainland, especially in fields such as business and engineering. In the eyes of us college students on the mainland, the career opportunities back home just simply do not match up to those available up here.

Aloha!

As a student from Hawaii attending college on the mainland, I will be faced with the decision of staying up here or returning home to the islands. Although my current career path has forced me to make that decision earlier than most college undergraduates, I have yet to decide when (or whether or not) I want to return to Hawai'i. I know that there are so many factors to consider, such as housing costs, career opportunities, education issues, and the general cost of living. Over the course of this semester, I look forward to blogging about areas related to this matter, including the aforementioned topics, my thoughts on Oahu’s prospective outlook, comparisons of Honolulu to Los Angeles and other West Coast cities, my reflections on the accounting profession (my current choice of career), and more. I am excited to look more closely into these issues, and I hope that others in similar positions to mine will find this blog interesting. Enjoy!