AccountingWEB, the online daily news magazine and resource center for members of the accounting profession, is pleased to announce its 2009 scholarship winners. Entrants were required to write a 500-word essay on the topic of "Green Accounting Firms." Essays were judged in a variety of areas including creativity, innovation, quality of writing, structure, logic, and sources/research.

Each winner will be awarded a $500 scholarship to assist with education costs.

This year's winners are:

• Hannah Weisner of Amherst, MA, attending University of Massachusetts.
   
• Molly Klusek of Philadelphia, PA, attending University of Scranton.
   
• Jill Kershaw of Tenino, WA, attending Saint Martin's University in Lacey, WA.

Hannah Weisner is going into her senior year as an Accounting/Kinesiology major with an Information Technology minor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She took her first accounting class her sophomore year of high school and has been pursuing it ever since. Earlier this year, she completed a winter internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers as an audit intern. This summer she will also be completing another internship as an internal audit internal Rogers Corporation. Her post-graduation plans with accounting involve continuing on as a full-time employee at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
 

• AccountingWEB 2009 Accounting Student Scholarship Essay, By Hannah Weisner

Molly Klusek is from Philadelphia, PA. She initially became interested in the field of business through a course at Temple University that she completed as a senior in high school, called the Business Leadership Academy. The course consisted of a microeconomics class and a group project involving the creation of a business plan. Later, she became attracted to accounting through the advice of her family and teachers. She has always enjoyed mathematics and possesses a knack for paying great attention to detail. In fact, her mother, to this day, tells the anecdote of how, as a young child, Molly would line her toys up in perfectly straight lines, perhaps in a similar manner to the posting of journal entries in a general ledger.

Currently, Molly am enrolled in the University of Scranton’s five-year MBA Program. She will graduate in May 2010 with both a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting and a Master of Business Administration degree.

After completing the graduate program at the University of Scranton with her B.S./M.B.A. degree, Molly hopes to work in the area of auditing at a Big Four firm for several years. Within five years, she intends to take the CPA exam and become a certified public accountant. She hopes to later apply to the FBI because it has always been an interest of hers to work in the area of forensics or fraud investigation, and she believes that it would be a demanding, yet exciting experience.
 

• Accounting firms leading green change, By Molly Klusek

Jill Kershaw lives in Tenino, Washington with her husband and 4 of their 5 children. After 20 years as a stay-at-home mom, she returned to school full time at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington to get her accounting degree and will graduate in December 2009. A 3.93 student, Jill became interested in accounting after helping her extended family with their taxes, and she would like to work in auditing as a fraud examiner.
 

• Green Accounting Firms, By Jill Kershaw