Alumni Story

I was blessed to have a tremendous career, a wonderful life! I owe this in big part to my education at Catawba College. All of my Catawba professors ingrained in me the thought that 'to teach is to touch a life forever'. ”

James (Jim) Emig ’75 was a first-generation college student from Lancaster County, PA, back in 1971.  He came to Catawba certain that he would major in marketing and would go on to “make it big in the business world”. 

The professor he feels he was blessed to have for his first accounting class at Catawba, Mr. Benjamin, “changed my life’s direction forever!”, as Jim puts it. “He convinced me that accounting was the most flexible of ALL the business majors, and I truly enjoyed doing the homework each night.” Jim believes that the consistency and logic of accounting was what he related to most, seeing his balance sheets balance and his cash flow statements tied together. He also took all of the finance classes that were then available at Catawba.

In Jim’s senior year, he took business law and gave serious consideration to going to law school. His business law professor encouraged him in that pursuit and explained that entrance to law school “required” three things: money, grades, and connections. While Jim believed his grades were ‘adequate’, his overall prospects for law school were not. “There was no money for tuition and no family contacts to help with admission,” he remarks.

However, his law professor at Catawba personally reached out and secured an assistantship for Jim so that he could enroll in the MBA program at nearby UNC-Greensboro. “This was the only way that I could afford to continue my education in accounting and finance,” Jim adds. An opportunity soon arose during his assistantship for Jim to volunteer as the first ‘teaching assistant’ in the UNC-G School of Business, Jim took on the challenge. During his second year of the MBA program, Jim was assigned to teach financial accounting and was given a book, a class list, and a classroom in which to teach. He had found his life’s calling, or maybe it had found him. “To say I was ‘hooked’ on the classroom experience is an understatement,” describes Jim’s thoughts about teaching.

After Jim graduated from UNC-G with his MBA, he stayed at UNC-G as a full-time instructor for two years. By then, he married his wife, Julie, a native of Concord, NC, and the prospect of exploring public accounting held appeal for several reasons, including Jim’s needing a year of experience to attain his CPA license. Testing the waters at a Greensboro regional public accounting firm allowed Jim to decide if that was what he wanted to pursue professionally, or if he wanted to return to teaching. Jim obtained his CPA, but remarks, “It only took four months to realize that the classroom was a much better fit”. Following his wife’s completion of her degree and graduation, the couple traveled to Texas A&M for Jim to pursue a Ph.D. in accounting and finance.  In 1983, with Jim’s doctorate degree in hand, the pair returned to Pennsylvania where Jim began his teaching career with Villanova University, retiring this past June after a remarkable forty-one-year career. While at Villanova, Jim was honored with the Student Government Teaching Award, the Dougherty Teaching Award as best undergraduate teacher in the Villanova School of Business, and the Lindback Teaching Award as best teacher at Villanova. During this journey Jim and Julie became proud parents of triplets – quite a surprise as they were expecting twins – and the Villanova campus community had nicknamed the twins “Debit and Credit”, in honor of Jim’s tie to accounting. Jim and Julie have now celebrated 46 years of marriage.

Jim wants to express his gratitude as he reflects on his time at Catawba and the years since, “I was blessed to have a tremendous career, a wonderful life! I owe this in big part to my education at Catawba College.  All of my Catawba professors ingrained in me the thought that ‘to teach is to touch a life forever’.  I can only hope that my +10,000 students experienced the same love of accounting that I encountered while at Catawba.”