Victor Scott Burns started at GCSU as an adjunct professor in the 1990s, and then he started working with J.P. Morgan.
“I’d always wanted to come back and teach accounting, and so I’ve been looking for about 10 years at an opportunity, and an opportunity came up at Kennesaw State,” Burns said. “I taught there for a year, and then this opportunity came up three years ago, and Dr. Snyder was kind enough to let me come enjoy the Georgia College teaching world.”
Burns earned his Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting from West Georgia College, and he went on to earn his Master of Taxation from Georgia State University.
“I got into accounting because when I was in my first accounting course that all business majors take at West Georgia College,” Burns said. “The very first day of class, the accounting instructors pointed to one of the students in the back. She was older, well older at the time, about 28. And asked this lady to stand up and tell the class why she’s taking accounting.”
This woman in his accounting class had a plumbing business with her husband, and she wanted to understand where the money was going after they had quadrupled their business. After hearing her story, Burns switched his major to accounting because he knew that if people do not understand accounting, they can not make the big decisions in a business.
Burns teaches classes such as Principles of Accounting I, II and Taxation here at GCSU.
“So for the last 10 years, I was thinking to myself, well I want to go back and remind these people that what you’re learning is not theory,” Burns said. “What you’re learning are going to be the tools that one day allow you to excel in business, make hard business decisions, and if you so choose, take on more and greater responsibilities, and so I kind of feel like my job, my passion, my hobby, are all that.”
On the first week of school, Burns displays the principles his students are going to learn in his Principles of Accounting class that they will be covering for the semester.
“It is simply assets, liability and equity, which that is the building blocks of how accounting information is derived, and understanding how it’s derived gives you the ability to understand how to use the information, and that’s the beauty,” Burns said.
Students learning these building blocks helps Burns when they get to Accounting II. In this class, he brings in real-world examples to get the students to work through them. He helps them to see that if the fundamentals are not understood, that can lead to a bad decision being made or to a great opportunity because it was understood.
Burns wants his students to be able to recognize an issue and be able to solve it by equipping them with the tools for when they get out into the business world.
For students that do not understand the lessons Burns is teaching, he works to help them anyway he can.
“So, I kind of look at a multi-pronged approach, because I know students learn differently,” Burns said. “I learned differently, I had two kids, they learned differently, so I know no two students learn the same, so I kind of think of a four-pronged approach.”
Burns knows a handful of students will learn accounting by listening to a lecture.
Burns lays the ground work in the classroom and then provides students with homework assignments to work through after they do class activities to help them get as much practice as they can. He spends three hours each day in his office for students to spend one-on-one time with him to walk through problems posted during lectures.
Once his students can go through his PowerPoints and solve those problems, they can apply that knowledge to any business situation they may be in.
“After you teach something for a few years, you understand the material,” Burns said. “So, that is not the challenge anymore. The challenge is how do you spark the interest in about two minutes of an 18, 19, or 20-year-old, so that for the next 40 or 50 minutes, they’re mostly tuned in. So, that is what I spend a ridiculous amount, proportionally speaking, most of my time is spent on, okay, here’s the material.”
Burns tries to do this by starting classes with an open-ended question and letting his students work through their tools to answer the question.
Burns tries to reach all of his students and help them build confidence in their knowledge to look at any problem and solve it.
“I used to think I teach 150 students a semester, and then I was talking to my dad, actually, I said, I teach 150 students,” Burns said. “I said, what I should think is, I teach three classes, and those classes are all different. And my dad, he’s a philosopher at heart, ‘he said, “you don’t teach three classes, you teach one student.”’ ‘He said, “you teach one student when you go in there, and you don’t know which student it is, and it’s going to change day to day.”’
Burns did not understand this at first, but he realized that not all students will be focused during class, but for that one person that is, he needs to provide them with the energy and excitement that comes from teaching accounting.
“I started off thinking my job was to show students the material and give a lecture,” Burns said. “And now I think my job is to energize students, help them understand the importance of the material, and they will do the learning pretty much, not without me, but a lot of learning is on their own.”
Describing himself as a kid in a candy store when talking about accounting or tax, he hopes to spark that interest in at least one to two students each semester.
Burns also helps to run the Vita Tax Help group on campus, which helps the people of Milledgeville file their taxes with the help of the accounting students from GCSU. The help sessions are on Mondays and Wednesdays in Atkinson Hall.
Burns hopes to be able to speak with the high schoolers of Milledgeville to inform them of the great career options that will open to them as accounting majors.
“The important thing is not covering the material,” Burns said. “It is reaching the students. And so I’m much more flexible now to move kind of inside that lecture concept if I see something that’s really interesting to students.”