Interning with a Dutch Accountant by Ruth Paget
When I moved to Detroit (Michigan) from the suburbs (Royal Oak), I attended a private Friends School (Quaker) my freshman year.
The Quakers wanted Detroit’s nomenklatura kids (“We’re going to live on the parents’ auto stocks”) to do vocational training that would lead to jobs. We first took the Myers-Briggs Interest Inventory to find out what kinds of work skills we already had.
I scored highly in quantitative and analytical skills with accountant listed as a good profession for me. I was mortified. I wanted to be an anthropologist, travel writer, and art historian. My smart Quaker teacher said, “Use math and analysis when you do all of those.”
We next did informational interviews with people doing jobs we thought we like to do. One of the people I interviewed was an accountant at Coopers and Lybrand, who worked in the Renaissance Center downtown. (I liked the office location and wanted to live in the hotel there.) The accountant’s job was very busy, but interesting. She noted that communication skills were just as important as math skills to be an accountant.
When it came time to do our internship, I worked for the school accountant, who was Dutch. I wanted to be compatible with a Dutch boss, so I put on my anthropologist’s hat and did some research.
One of my friends in Royal Oak was Dutch, so I did know some things about Dutch culture:
-The Dutch eat lots of casseroles made with sliced vegetables, shredded cheese, and cream. Casseroles are a delicious food $ hack.
-The Dutch also eat pancakes at any time of day. These are made with eggs and milk for a hidden source of protein and calcium.
-My friend’s mom worked part-time selling Amway cleaning products.
-My friend’s dad was an engineer with Wayne County and was probably waiting to get a job at an auto company.
-The family’s religion wad Dutch Reform. I went to vacation Bible School with my friend several summers and won Bibles for memorizing Bible stories.
-The kids and I all went ice skating after school like little Hans Brinkers.
That was my ethnographic survey of second-generation Dutch in Michigan. I also read about the importance of maintaining dikes to keep below-sea-level Netherlands from flooding in a Time-Life book about the country.
I thought my Dutch boss would be a stickler about maintaining order given her cultural background for my analytical part of internship preparation.
My boss told me I would be helping her organize “Accounts Payable” – bill or invoices the school had to pay. The “Accounts Receivable” – tuition payments and other sources of income – were private. She had a stack of bills piled up on my desk. She showed me a legal date stamp and told me to stamp areas on invoices with no printing on them to not cover up numbers.
Once I went through those, she gave me a chronological journal to write up the bills I had stamped with the following information:
-date received
-creditor name
-invoice amount
-creditor invoice number
Once I had the chronological file done, I was to assign payments to budget accounts. The accountant showed me the Chart of Accounts, budgets allocated for payment. She cut up strips of sticky notes and had me write the account number of which account I thought the invoice should be paid from along with the name of the account to help me memorize the Chart of Accounts.
Then, I was to put the invoices in order by account number. Once, the invoices were in numeric order. I had to put them in alphabetical order within the account number.
The accountant reviewed all my work before entering it into the IBM computer.
I also used a business correspondence reference book to help draft business letters for the accountant and did inventory control (newest items in back of older ones).
At the end of the internship, I told my teachers I had learned the value of maintaining systems, especially financial ones.
(Note: I met my Dutch boss at a Youth for Understanding host family orientation several years later where I was volunteering as a former exchange student to Japan. She was going to host a student. I knew she and her family would have a happy, well-organized time.)
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
