Financial Fun
Student is the first recipient of scholarship to pursue accounting at the graduate level.
Some students enter college with a specific career in mind, while many more use their undergraduate years to explore various subjects and disciplines, and in the process, discover their passion. Billy Bloom ’25 was one of the latter.
Bloom had come to Washington with enough Advanced Placement credits to have completed many of his distribution courses already. So, he used his first year to take a variety of classes and see what might stick. It didn’t take him long to find his calling. The spring of his first year, Bloom took an accounting class, and he was hooked.
“I was intuitively good at it,” Bloom said of accounting. “It’s always fun being good at something.”
Accounting was more than just a subject in which Bloom excelled. Reading audits and case studies was like solving enjoyable puzzles. “You just build a puzzle to figure out why the accounts don’t balance,” he explained.
Now, thanks to a postgraduate partnership between Washington College and the Loyola University of Maryland Master of Accounting (MAcc) program, Bloom will be able to pursue his passion at the graduate level. In the fall, he will join Loyola’s accelerated master’s, a 10-month program that will provide the necessary credit hours Bloom needs to sit for the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exams.
Bloom is also the first recipient of the Allender Family Scholarship in Accounting, created by John Allender ’11 and his father Pat Allender P’11, who earned his undergraduate degree from Loyola.
My plan, if everything goes perfectly, is to graduate in August, take all of the CPA sections next May, pass them first try, and have my certification by July.
“It’s been such a pressure lifted off,” Bloom said of receiving the Allender scholarship. “My plan, if everything goes perfectly, is to take all of the CPA sections next May, pass them first try, and have my certification by July.”
A lofty goal, but not an impossible one, considering Bloom’s track record at Washington. After discovering his affinity for accounting in his first year, he decided to major in business management and minor in accounting. Later, when he realized that many of the finance courses overlapped and dovetailed with the other courses he was taking, he added a minor in finance.
“It all just kind of made sense to me,” Bloom said. “I started taking more finance classes and saw it was all connected. A lot of the basic principles of accounting help you better understand finance.”
Not only has he succeeded academically, Bloom has already had a taste of success in the real world. This past year, he interned at Radcliffe Corporate Services Inc., doing accounting work during tax season. His primary job was to sort through client information to identify key figures and documents needed to file their taxes. Oftentimes, that meant going through boxes and boxes of receipts.
“Accountants don’t need all your receipts, just the totals,” Bloom joked.
After putting in the legwork of sifting through all those boxes at Radcliffe, Bloom got the opportunity to apply finance practices he’d learned in class. The owner of the firm asked him to calculate the present value of an annuity for a client’s potential purchase, which involved determining the total of all future payouts from the annuity.
“I was like, ‘I can do that in like a minute.’ And I did, and it came back with a better number than they anticipated,” Bloom said. “The next morning, I had class with the same professor who taught me how to do present values and told her I did one at work.”
He added, “It’s nice to have those skill sets where they lend to each other and overlap.”
The internship at Radcliffe was not the only real-world experience Bloom gained while at Washington. He was also part of the Brown Advisory Program, a one-credit course in which students manage a $2.2 million portfolio.
The portfolio contains about 30 stocks in 11 different sectors, Bloom explained, and each student oversees one or two stocks. The class meets Wednesday mornings in the Brown Advisory Investing Lab, where students present their stock and suggest what the group should do with it: buy, hold, sell, or trim positions. Students appointed as senior analysts oversee each sector, and during presentations, provide rebuttals to the arguments. After rebuttals, others in the class can ask questions and challenge or support the suggestion.
Bloom served as co-manager of the portfolio and was a senior analyst overseeing the industrial and energy sectors this year.
“It’s a requirement for most classes in the business department to read at least two Wall Street Journal articles in the business section every week with a 250-word summary of the article, so most people are generally aware of the market,” Bloom said. “And in portfolio management, you have people that are interested in the investment field who stay up to date on everything, so you get a lot of questions driving productive conversations and debates.”
Bloom said that a lot of the coursework he completed throughout his time at Washington was hands-on, with practical exams and homework as well as practical experiences in the classroom. It’s because of this, Bloom said, that he’s been able to come out of his shell during his time at Washington: the academic environment here encourages students to ask questions.
“The kind of classroom culture is cultivated where you can ask questions or give answers and have absolutely no fear of being wrong because even if you are, you’re corrected, so in the future you don’t make that mistake again,” he said.
His coursework has not only taught him a broad range of skills he will use in the future, but his professors have set it up so that courses across the business and finance departments build on and connect with each other as well as connecting very directly with the real world of business and finance.
“My professors have done a great job preparing me to go out and work in the industry,” Bloom said. “Getting to use those skills in a setting where it’s real and has real consequences—the difference between grades and a client’s actual information, the money they’re making, and their livelihood—has translated into what I’m doing now.” —MacKenzie Brady '21
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