Esther Drillick is Recognized by the AICPA and NASBA with Prestigious Elijah Watt Sells Award The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) announced this year’s winners of the Elijah Watt Sells Award and Touro alum Esther Drillick (Lander College of Arts & Sciences 2024) was among the 11 outstanding performers who received this honor. The Elijah Watts Sells Award is granted to CPA candidates who obtain a cumulative average score above 95.50 across four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination. The 11 extraordinary individuals who met the criteria for the award were selected from 74,000 test takers who sat for the CPA Exam in 2024. “The Elijah Watt Sells Award represents one of the highest honors in the CPA profession, and this year’s recipients are not only technically exceptional, they are also poised to shape the future of the profession. As the accounting landscape evolves, their leadership, integrity, and drive for excellence will play a vital role in upholding public trust and guiding businesses through complexity and change,” said Susan Coffey, CPA, CGMA, CEO of public accounting at the AICPA. A Love of Logic Propels An Accounting Career Esther Drillick earned her Bachelor of Science in accounting at Touro University’s Lander College of Arts & Sciences and is currently employed as a fiscal officer with YVY ECC in Brooklyn. Drillick, a graduate of Bais Yaakov D’Rav Meir and Mesores Rochel Seminary in Israel, chose accounting because she loves logic and math. She chose Touro because she wanted a school with “a great academic reputation and a Jewish environment.” Drillick’s father is a hedge fund manager, one grandfather is a CPA and the other held a PhD in mathematics and so coming from a numbers-driven family, it was no surprise that she took to the field right away. She appreciated the rigorous accounting program at Touro that ultimately prepared her for the CPA exam. She was amazed as she began studying for the CPA– a process that took her a full year—that there was very little new material on the test. “It was mostly a review of what I had learned at Touro,” says Drillick. She took three months to study for each part of the exam and when she saw how well she did on the first part, she thought about trying for the award but at first, didn’t think she wanted the pressure. After taking the second part of the exam and scoring quite well, she thought “maybe I should go for it! I decided then to challenge myself to achieve this goal. At that point, I just had this feeling I could do it,” shares Drillick. “I had a lot of support as my whole family was rooting for me.” One of the professors who used simulated CPA exams in his homework and classwork and truly prepared students for the high-stakes test was an Elijah Watts Sells Award winner himself. Professor Shulem Rosenbaum, now a partner at Roth & Co, was one of Touro’s previous winners of this prestigious national award over a decade ago. According to Drillick, “Professor Rosenbaum and all of my accounting professors really cared about the success of their students. Not just in terms of learning the material, but also in terms of networking and finding […]