Scholar’s business acumen earns him a handful of Penn State degrees
5/1/2012
By Megan Dutill ‘13
College Relations Intern
Note: This week, the Schreyer Honors College is showcasing five Schreyer Scholars who are members of the spring 2012 graduating class. A women’s hockey player who has attacked her studies and her activities with the same zeal she’s shown on the ice. A student who is completing the requirements for so many majors (four) along with a graduate degree that he has had to complete his graduation forms the old-fashioned way – on paper – because the computerized system doesn’t have enough fields to accurately reflect his academic record. A budding physicist who found time to complete two honors theses in between spending a summer in Switzerland working on the Large Hadron Collider and competing on Penn State’s ultimate Frisbee team. A geography major who fielded marriage proposals while conducting her thesis research in Africa. And an environmental advocate who is leaving Penn State and its residence halls a bit greener than when he arrived on campus. Today: Charlie Frazier who by the weekend will have earned four undergraduate and one master’s degree from Penn State.
No one has ever done it before, but that hasn’t stopped Charlie Frazier.
When he walks off the stage during commencement ceremonies this weekend, the graduating Schreyer Scholar will have earned a master’s degree in accounting, four bachelor’s degrees – in accounting, finance, international studies and German – and a minor in international business.
According to Benjamin Lansford, the director of the Master of Accounting program, quadruple degrees in addition to a master’s is “unheard of.” In fact, he notes that Charlie’s graduation paperwork had to be filed manually because there wasn’t even space to enter all of his degrees in the online record system.
According to Charlie, “It just happened.”
AP credits from high school gave him a head start, and instead of switching majors from finance to accounting, he decided to do them both. A semester abroad in Germany, an interest in international business and the extra year required for the master’s program helped him to finish the rest.
And come fall, he’ll be putting all of those degrees to good use by working for international accounting firm KPMG. Charlie will be part of an audit team reviewing companies’ financial statements. He’ll also have the opportunity to travel and possibly live abroad.
“I’m excited about my job because I can do a lot of different things,” Charlie says. “What’s going to be cool about that is just learning how companies work from the inside because, in order to properly audit them, you have to understand everything they do and be able to analyze their risk as a company.”
It’s also a good stepping stone toward his dream of becoming the CFO or owner of a business one day. “Operationally, a lot of businesses are very similar, and there’s a logical progression from auditing to working for a private company and going from that to being a CFO,” Charlie says.
For now, though, Charlie is focusing on the benefit that thesis research will give him in his accounting job. “There’s a lot of people that can just do some of the accounting work I’ll be doing and not think about it at all, but I’ll be able to understand what’s going on, and that’s huge,” he says.
Charlie studied executive stock options and the confusing way that they are currently being disclosed to shareholders. Currently, the executives are given the option to buy stocks at a specific low price in several years, and they can make a lot of money if the market price is higher when they actually buy them. The problem lies in the fact that the actual amount of money they earn from that transaction is not recorded – instead, the financial records use a number that was estimated when the stock options were first issued.
“The exact amount they compensate the executives never shows up in the financial statements,” Charlie says. “It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around conceptually – it took me so long to understand what was going on in this one topic, I realized I could make a thesis out of it. I’m looking at how this is impacting companies because it can be huge – a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars that shareholders don’t even know about.”
But Charlie doesn’t spend all of his time studying or doing research. He’s also gained some hands-on experience through internships with Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and KPMG, and he was the treasurer for the Schreyer Honors College Student Council – a position he describes as “running a small business.”
He’s done a lot during his time at Penn State. But looking back, Charlie says that he’ll always remember the people he was surrounded by. Many Scholars refer to the Schreyer community as a family, and for Charlie that’s actually true. His grandparents, William and Joan Schreyer, founded the Honors College in 1997 with a $30 million gift to Penn State.
“It’s really about the people,” he says about the friends he’s made. “There is a lot of energy here, and it makes you realize that it’s important to have the right type of people around you, who are going to be good friends and push you to be better. The people in the Honors College are really motivated, and a lot of them will go off in all sorts of different directions and do really cool things.”
According to Lansford, Charlie will be one of those students “doing really cool things.”
“He’ll go far. He’s a hard worker and gets things done, and he’s an open-minded guy, willing to take on new challenges. He can go anywhere.”
That's what five degrees will get you. Challenges. Options Opportunities. And Charlie Frazier has proven that he knows how to make the most of those.