Heather Baker, CPA and adjunct professor at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University. Photo by Hannah Patterson/Costello College of Business.
Heather Baker is a CPA with 15 years of audit and tax experience at EY. She focused on the health care industry, and, in addition to client service responsibilities, she was involved in developing internal software programs and procedures. Throughout her public accounting career, she consistently recruited, mentored, and worked with newer staff members, developing her love for teaching. After encouragement from one of her old professors, Baker decided to make the career switch.
Baker has now been an adjunct professor at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University for more than two decades. At Costello, she found a home—a place where she could embrace her joy for teaching and use her skills to make an impact on the next generation of accountants. “I think Costello pivots more quickly than other institutions to meet the needs of its community, and I really enjoy being part of that,” she says. In 2017, her impact was recognized at the university level when she received the Adjunct Teaching Excellence Award.
“I think Costello pivots more quickly than other institutions to meet the needs of its community, and I really enjoy being part of that.”
— Heather Baker, CPA and adjunct professor at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University
When she was a student, Baker recalls, she was always the one asking why they were doing something and why they were doing it in that particular way. Now, through her instruction, she hopes to inspire her students to explore their own curiosities. For instance, she’s currently teaching the second introductory accounting class, a required course that many students put off taking. “What I really try to do is at least have them appreciate why the school required it and why we are asking every single Costello graduate to take this class,” she says.
One of the biggest joys Baker receives from teaching is watching a student overcome a challenge. She taught an analytics course where none of the students thought they would be able to build the assigned database, but they would all end up completing it. Currently, she’s teaching Accounting 303, where she helps students embrace the mechanics and stop the guesswork. “When they get it and it starts working for them, then all these other things build on top of it,” she says. Baker finds that process to be quite fulfilling.
She wants her students to be ready for what they will encounter in their careers after graduation. In addition to drawing on her own experiences in public accounting, Baker regularly consults with colleagues in the field to understand what employers expect from undergraduate accounting graduates. In a previous accounting information systems course, she strengthened her students’ analytical skills by taking unfiltered descriptions of a company’s business events and guiding them to extract key information to design a relational database for business transactions, helping them integrate analytical thinking with the rule‑application skills taught in other accounting courses.
After years of building expertise in public accounting, Heather Baker has realized her lifelong dream of teaching as she prepares Costello accounting students to think critically and overcome challenges. The supportive, engaging classroom environment she’s known for is a tribute to her ongoing dedication to help students build confidence in their accounting abilities.