During her junior year in college, over numerous coffee chats with people about their careers, Natalie Overby heard the same refrain: “If you don’t know where you want to start, start with public accounting.” She decided it was good advice. 

Once she decided on a pathway, she talked with someone who worked for a Big Four firm and who gave her more specific direction: “I know the person you need to talk to. He’s a Vanderbilt alum.”

From that next conversation, Natalie concluded that Vanderbilt was the right place for her. “I needed to be somewhere that someone who wasn’t an accounting major could learn both a large amount of technical skills plus the soft skills and then sit for the CPA exam, all in one year. The leadership and soft-skills learning rounds out students to not just be technically able to do the work, but to work efficiently with clients and others as well.” 

Fall Immersion Week, when accounting professionals come to campus for presentations on advanced audit topics, helped confirm to Natalie that she had made the right choice—in both her career and her school. “It was a fantastic opportunity to network with professionals, get a feel of their firms’ cultures, and find out what topics we were most interested in.” As part of that week’s immersion, Natalie researched and made a presentation on a case of fraud that led her to consider an eventual career as a forensic accountant. 

But it was the internship with KPMG in Mod 3 in the spring that really validated her choices. “It also proved how efficient the Vandy curriculum is,” she says, “and how much I learned over just a few months, how much I had grown in terms of technical skills. I was doing things that first-year associates were working on. And my teammates trusted me to take on those pieces of the project, because they knew I had such a strong background in those accounting skills.

“Being a part of this program has really felt like the culmination of all my hard work and just the right place to really start my professional career.”

Fun Fact: Natalie was a member of the women’s tennis team for four years at Denison University. Now, she plays in a working women’s tennis league in Nashville.

I needed to be somewhere that someone who wasn’t an accounting major could learn both a large amount of technical skills plus the soft skills and then sit for the CPA exam, all in one year.