Interview with Dr. Brock

Dr. Brock, an accounting professor at the University of the Cumberlands. Photo Credits: University of the Cumberlands

The Univeristy of the Cumberlands is known as a college that has very skilled and technical majors, some including pre-engineering, education, pre-medicine, and accounting. In addition to the variety of majors that are offered are also a multitude of professors who are highly trained in their fields. One of these teachers is Dr. Jake Brock who is an assistant professor in the Hutton School of Business. He is an alumnus of the Univeristy of the Cumberlands where he has earned his B.A. in Accounting, his M.B.A. in Accounting, his M.A. in Christian Studies, and last year he completed his Ph.D. in Business Administration with a concentration in Accounting. Dr. Brock also is a Certified Public Accountant, for which on his first attempt, got a 100% on the test. He has also previously worked as a financial and cost accountant as well. In addition to his incredible background involving the accounting atmosphere, Dr. Brock is also a pastor. His faculty directory page is here if you would like to learn more about his education and achievements.    

He started serving as a pastor back when he was in high school and currently, he is serving as the minister at the Swiss Colony Baptist Church in London, Kentucky. There is much to learn from Dr. Brock, because he is a teacher at the school, was once a student as well, and went to the Univeristy of the Cumberlands. He knows the rigors that the college entails, the challenges of staying on track with work, while also saving some time for worship as well. What is commonly viewed as a boring and uninteresting job, Dr. Brock makes accounting interesting and enjoyable to learn. Not only does he enlighten students with why accounting is a wonderful field of study, but he is also and reminder to students that they can go far and they can climb high in life as long as they work hard, are determined to succeed, and travel the path that God has laid out for them. 

To start out the interview and to get to know who you are a bit, Dr. Brock, what is a quality that is essential to who you are? 

I would say compassion. Part of the reason why I chose this career path and answered the calling both as a pastor and a college professor is that I care about other people. I want people to be successful and I want to see them to do well, particularly in my calling as a college professor. I have always longed for the field of accounting. I have always enjoyed studying accounting. I enjoy doing it when I was doing it in practice, but there is an additional dimension that brings whole different level of meaning when you are teaching other people how to engage in a profession or teach them the principles of that discipline. When I get to see other people succeed, that is probably one of the most rewarding parts and I would consider that a motivating attribute and a core characteristic for myself. 

 

The Hutton School of Business building where Dr. Brock teaches his aspiring accounting students. Photo Credits: University of the Cumberlands 

You talk about in class how accountants can get paid in the triple digits, so what was your motivation to be a college professor? 

It was the dimension of being able to teach, mentor, and invest in the lives of other people. Being an accountant is meaningful as well, because there you can invest in the success of other individuals and in the success of the company by using the skills you’ve developed in order to help managers manage their company more effectively or help those who are looking to invest and to provide for retirement or provide for their kid’s colleges. This means that the role of an accountant and the role of accounting in society is critically important and for me that extends to the classroom. For me as a college professor, I can teach an entire generation every year. I teach that accounting is the language of business. If accounting helps us understand the world of business, then it will help us understand those people better. All these would be motivating factors. 

In addition to being a college professor, you are also a pastor as well. How can you manage being both?

That is a great question and it is a lot of careful balance and one of the things that helps facilitate that is added flexibility of being a college professor. I work more hours as a college professor than I ever did when I was in practice as an accountant, but the advantage is that I can get a lot more flexibility to plan those work hours. When I worked in practice as an accountant, it was a Monday through Friday job and if I was called upon for a funeral or for a hospital visit, it could get very challenging. One of the things that I appreciate now as a college professor is that while I have obligations and a lot of demands, I have more autonomy and flexibility as long as I meet my core deadlines. Another thing that is helpful is the fact that you can interact with other people. In my role now, I get to do ministry through my role as a professor. I get to lead my classes in prayer and if one of my students are going through a crisis of some kind, I can minister to them through my role as their professor. I really don’t see those as two separate compartments of my life. I am still one person. I am a teacher in the classroom and a teacher at the pulpit as a minister. 

You have many degrees and multiple accomplishments already, so why did you go for your Ph.D.? 

For several reasons. The first reason is that when I was a freshman in high school, I had always wanted to earn a doctoral degree. I wanted to go as high with my education as I possibly could. As I was going through the rigors of the accounting major and came to the completion of my undergraduate degree, I came to the point where I wanted work in practice for a while, get my CPA license, and then revisit graduate school in the future. The day of graduation, Dr. Margret Combs and Dr. Vonda Moore approached me and pointed out to me that if I took the master’s program, that it would be possible for me to teach. That was actually the reason why I went to graduate school and had it not been for both of them, I would have never gone to graduate school. Then there are several reasons why I wanted to go onto my doctorate. The first reason is for an example to my students. It shows them that education has value. I wanted to show them as their professor, and show myself, that I have reached the top credentials, because there is nothing higher than when you have a doctorate. The other and more practical reason is that with the doctoral degree, there is a whole different realm of classes that you can teach. With a master’s degree you can teach up to college senior level classes, but in order to teach graduate classes at the master’s level or the doctoral level, I would have to have that terminal degree. 

With all of your degrees and accomplishments, what is one skill that you would still like to master?

There are several skills that I would like to master. I would not be so arrogant as to claim that I have every skill as a college professor or as a pastor. There are a variety of skills like public speaking skills, interpersonal communication skills, and technical professional skills that we are always looking to sharpen. That is why we call our profession the practice of public accounting, because it is something that we seek to continually get better at. Truly, two things in particular in my role that I am always seeking to improve are interpersonal skills and public speaking skills. In high school, I had a terrifying fear of public speaking and I did not want to do it. I did not want to participate in it. I hated being called upon to make a presentation in the classroom. Ironically, however, in my life as a pastor and a college professor, that’s everything that I do. I am always seeking to get better and improve my teaching skills, my public speaking, and presentation skills. On the interpersonal front, one of the blessings and the challenges of teaching as a professor in the Hutton School of Business and at the University of the Cumberlands, is that we have students from not only a variety of geographical locations in the United States, but also from different areas of the world. Along with this blessing is the challenge of effectively communicating and understanding people who come from different cultures and different experiences. This helps us expand from our own understanding. I have spent all my life as a resident in south eastern Kentucky and to share the profession and an understanding of it requires a constant development. As you meet different people with different backgrounds, different things resonate with them. I think all of the professors are passionate about that and how are we going to continue improving a greater and greater excellence in the pursuit of education.

How about in the area of accounting, are there still any skills you would like to master?

This is all in addition to the skills I have just mentioned, I still seek to improve my own understanding of the constantly changing accounting profession which includes all of our standards and our laws. That’s always a given. Then comes the challenge of presenting that to my students and figuring out better and more effective ways of teaching that information. 

Little kids watch in admiration to the heroes they hope to grow up to be one day.  Photo Credits: Fire Engineering

When you were a kid, what we some of the job titles that you wanted to “grow up to be?” 

That’s a wonderful question. There were two things that I chiefly wanted to be as a kid and those were being a firefighter and a medical doctor. Neither one seemed to have to deal with the other, but those were the two things that I just thought would be the neatest thing to be in the world. As I grew up and went into middle school and high school, at some point in time I rotated around wanting to be virtually everything in every profession with the exception of being an accountant. That is what is interesting. Until I entered college, I just never wanted to be an accountant. It was never on my radar. 

So then why did you choose to be an accountant?

Coming to the understanding of being an accountant was an evolutionary process. I answered the call to ministry when I was in high school, I began preaching when I was 16 years old, and was licensed to preach when I was 17 years old. I then began serving as interim pastor for my first church when I was 18. That was when I was a senior in high school. Through the course of that experience, I pretty much knew I was going to college and that I was going to study ministry in some form or fashion. I came here as a religion and communications arts double major, but I switched from communications arts and toyed around with the idea of being a business administration major. I was working as a staff writer for the Patriot newspaper and at that time the Univeristy of the Cumberlands had developed the M.B.A. program and the E.D.D. program, the Doctor of Education program. This was at my freshman year and I wrote the article detailing the new programs and as a part of that responsibility I interviewed both the director for the E.D.D. program and Dr. Combs about the new M.B.A. program. At the conclusion of the interview with Dr. Combs I had asked her about the possibility of being a double major in accounting and religion and I asked her how I would start. She told me that she was teaching a principles of accounting 1 class and she asked if I would take her class to check it out and see if I liked it. I took her advice and took the class and then I absolutely fell in love with accounting. After that, I switched majors to accounting and never looked back.

Then what about ministry? 

The reason why I was seeking out a double major is that I wanted the ability to go into vocational ministry, if that was the direction the Lord called me. Many pastors are full-time in their role, but many other pastors that serve churches are not able to be paid a full-time salary. As Dr. Clark in the missions and ministry department likes to say, “There is no such thing as part-time ministry, there is such thing as part-time pay for full-time ministry.” I wanted the ability to go into vocational ministry, and the Lord led me there, of course, but that was the reason why I sought out another major and that is why I ended up in accounting. 

 

The Swiss Colony Baptist Church located in London, Kentucky where Dr. Brock is a pastor. Photo Credits: The Swiss Colony Baptist Church

If you could go back in time and give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

If I had the blessing of knowing what I know now, there are many things that I probably would have done differently. I think it is the epidemy of arrogance to say, “well I wouldn’t do anything differently!” I don’t think I would have changed any of the major decisions in life, because those major decisions are the routes I needed to be on. I have no doubt that the Lord led me on those paths and led me to where I am now. Incidentally, along the way there are small mistakes that I wish I had not made. The one thing, however, that I wish I could have told myself if I could go back to freshman year and do it all again is that everything would work out fine. My freshman year of college was probably one of the most difficult years of my life with all of the challenges that had come through the ministry over the years. My freshman year I was faced with some unique challenges and the church that I was serving. I had gone through a very, very traumatic experience and some moral issues going on in the church that not a lot of people knew about. I was at the ripe age of 18 to 19 years old and I was handed the responsibility for handling this. While all of my other friends as freshman were all happy-go-lucky, I spent that year preaching funerals and leading churches through splits. The one thing that I wished I had known during all of that was that the Lord had it under control and everything would be fine. 

Who is your role model and why do you look up to this person? 

I have many role models that I have been blessed with. As a pastor, I had been blessed with my director of admissions, Brother Roy Faulkner, who has been a significant role model in my life as well as a number of other pastors that I have been blessed to work with. One of my primary role models was Dr. Margaret Combs. She is the one who hired me and brought me in as a professor. Dr. Vonda Moore has been a tremendous role model through both my M.B.A. program and for the doctoral program. She has taught me in many cases not just how to succeed, but also how to survive in higher education. Dr. Mike LaGrone who was a Cost Accounting professor, was also a tremendous role model. He was always my toughest professor and at the same time one who I learned the most under. As a colleague, he was very understanding, passionate, and helpful. There were days when I was in doctoral school that I would come in frustrated over the requirements for a class. Dr. LaGrone gave me the benefit of saying “that’s bonkers! I can’t believe that!” Sometimes just having someone understanding and able to say “that’s crazy” helps you for the sake of your own sanity. Gary Gibson was another mentor of mine. Also, for Micaiah Bailey, who taught at this institution. I now hold his seat on the faculty, and I am honored to both have his seat and his office. There were so many mentors and I am thankful for every one of them. 

You are a professor and minister now, but what was your very first job?

My very first job for which I was paid compensation was when I was serving as what’s called a ministry assistant, actually under Brother Roy, at his office. I was hired as his secretary that summer. He had a secretary, but she had to unexpectedly step out of that role and that is when he asked me to step in for her. That was the first regular go to work and work for a boss job. I have had many since then, including my job now, but that was my first W-2 job. My first ministry job was when I became interim pastor. 

 

Kevin Malone portrayed as a stereotypical accountant crunching numbers in the corner of the office in the TV Show, The Office. Photo Credits: Screenbid

When many people think of accountants, they think of the person in a cubicle, crunching numbers in the corner of the office. You, however, are very passionate about accounting and your work. What is the most important thing about accounting or what makes you so passionate about it?

A lot of people think, as you said, that accountants like to hide from people and crunch numbers, but the reality is that accountants are important people in the role of business. They are problem solvers; they are financial professionals who make the lives of business owners and the lives of the people who work in that business better. Accounting is the language of business and if you know how to speak that language and understand it, then you know how to help improve lives and improve their businesses, you then can also improve the lives of the stakeholders who might have a share in that business. Accounting has the impact and ability to change the lives of a whole lot of people in a whole lot of ways. There are a lot of accountants, but I have never seen the green visor. There are accountants who work in the traditional roles in traditional business settings, but there are also accountants who wear badges and break down doors, doing investigations for the FBI. The thing that is common among all accountants is that they are all servants to society. When I became a certified public accountant, I had to take an oath and that oath is to protect the public interest. That is who we are and that is why we are here. 

Ethics are a huge subject in accounting and should be a huge subject in all areas of life. What ethical statement, philosophy, or standard do you place in your life and why?

Ethics are formally defined as the normative standards of behavior in society. This is a fancy way of saying “it’s the way people often behave.” Now, as an accountant, there are actually a variety of codes of ethics that accountants are held to depending on the role of the accountant and the professional societies that they are a part of. As a certified public accountant, who is a member of both the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Kentucky Society of Certified Public Accountants, I am required to comply with the code of professional conduct of the AICPAs. It is a 300-page document that goes into very comprehensive rules about what accountants are and what they are not to do in their professional conduct. Those from a professional and a legal standpoint, yes, I am to comply with and support whole heartedly. I actually sit on the Professional Ethics Committee for the Kentucky Society of CPAs which is the committee for investigating and dealing with ethical infractions of members of the society. We are not the authority that takes away CPA licenses, that is for the Kentucky State Board of Accountants.

What about in your own life, outside of the business atmosphere?

On a deeper level, as a Christian, I believe that I am held to the supreme ethical standards that are held in the scriptures and the teachings that God has given in the scriptures and that goes beyond simply the ethical guidelines of code and professional conduct. One of the things that we have to recognize about ethics is that ethics as the normative standards of conduct of society is that they are rooted to the convictions that society holds, what we hold to be right and wrong. It is my Christian faith and my understanding of the world through my Christian world view is what informs me and helps me determine from what is right and what is wrong. For an example, I do not just believe that cheating and stealing are wrong simply because they rob someone of an economic benefit. There are a lot of things that can do that, but there is a deeper stand and a deeper principle given in the Christian faith that teaches us that cheating and stealing is inherently wrong and they are sins and that to steal or cheat from another is to inflict damage and hurt upon that person. That is a violation of the teachings of God.

We have talked a lot about your professions, but what is one thing that you like to do outside of the job atmosphere? Like a hobby?

I love to walk, I love to hike, and go to historical reenactments and historical events. I consider myself an amateur historian although I don’t have professional training as a historian. I love the study of history and particularly American history. I have a lot of different interests and I also love Kentucky history. That is something that personally fascinates me. For example, this weekend I am planning on attending the Camp Wildcat reenactment, which is a reenactment of a Civil War battlefield. The battle of Camp Wildcat is one of the earliest or maybe the earliest battles in the state of Kentucky. I really enjoy being able to learn new things and historical events about our area and America in general.

When I was in Pennsylvania I learned about the Civil War, but when I came down here, I learned a whole different side! History is incredibly interesting isn’t it? 

It is an amazing area to study and it absolutely is an eye-opening experience to learn about in our American history!

 

Business and accounting students listen carefully during their lecture while taking notes as to not miss any information. Photo Credits: University of the Cumberlands

In America, there is a stereotype that we will do anything to gain praise or acclaim, but what is something that you did for someone else as a small gesture or something that went above and beyond when no one was looking? 

Well see, I feel like I might violate that principle if I talk about that now… 

Ha ha I didn’t really think that through, did I?

Well in seriousness there are a variety of ways that I try to be helpful, both as a pastor and professor. Naturally there are things that we do, like advising, assigning grades, and things on that front, but it can also be as simple as granting a student a few hours of an extension on an assignment. You know, the stereotype for a professor is that most feel that students need to learn professional deadlines and I agree with that. That is, of course, one of the things we are here to do, is to help instill that understanding of punctuality, but on the same token a little bit of compassion can go a long way. I had a student recently who had an unexpected situation that arose with regards to an appliance issue at his home. He was working through some issues with his Father and he ended up managing to get his phone stuck way down in the foundations of his house. That in conjunction with a couple other things put him in a situation where he could not complete an assignment and so he requested an extension and I granted that. He was so relieved and even though I will not receive an “Outstanding Professor Award” for it, that little bit of understanding and compassion goes a long way. 

So, what then drives people to do these small acts of kindness, do you think, when there is no award at the end?

When you treat people with love and respect and you treat them as a human being, created in the image of God who is worth something, that understanding goes a long way in terms of making the world that we live in, a better place. It’s not just about the big things and the everyday heroes. There are people who deserve the praise and the recognition of everyday heroes, but everyone can be a hero in a small way every day simply by treating people with love, respect, and understanding and affirming that someone created them in the image of God. That doesn’t mean that you smile upon everything that everyone does. Going back to our discussion on ethics, there are right and wrong things and wrong things ought to be punished to an appropriate level, but a little bit of mercy can go a long way. I have made my days extremely hectic this week to meet with advisees in between classes and at unusual hours and went over my usual office hours, because my advisees are students, athletes, they have jobs, internships, they are members of clubs, different societies, and have many other roles and it can be different to make that schedule work. Flexibility and being able to accommodate a student and having an impromptu or meeting after a class, small things like that can mean a lot to a student who is under a lot of stress and pressure trying to figure things out. All of that can go a long way. 

Now, to end the interview, people think that accounting and taxation in general are hard subjects to understand, but what would you say is an accounting concept that the general public should know when handling with their own finances? 

Well that is true. Accounting, taxation, and business in general are hard concepts to understand and there are a variety of fundamental principles. One of these principles that is inherent to everything that we do as accountants is to keep track of your money. The reality is that there are a whole number of Americans and people across the world who simply do not know how to balance a checkbook, frankly because of online banking and they don’t think they need to. I understand that and if you log on and look at an app and see how much money you have, then that’s pretty straight forward, but know how much money you have. Go on, log in, and keep track of your finances and investments. Make responsible decisions. That’s the emphasis to everything that we do as accountants. We not only keep track of financial information and analyzing it, but the end goal of everything that we do is to provide information for decision makers, so that they can make responsible decisions. That’s why we do what we do. The whole thing breaks down when you have someone who disregards information and says, “you know what, we are going to make a gut decision!” Well, that may or may not work out well, because it is not based on logic and reason. As accountants what we do is to provide information and in turn society needs to understand that, that information is important, and it holds value for what they do and for the decisions they make. So, I guess the lesson that I am trying to get at is know how much money you have, keep track of that money, and then make well-reasoned and informed financial decision.