In the Spring of 2024, Suzanne Hitz returned to Shoreline College with a big puzzle to solve. Forty years after her 1982 graduation, she was assigned to help her alma mater recover after a college-wide ransomware incident damaged many of the College Foundation’s financial records. It was a big job, but Suzanne was up to the task. She was now an expert forensic accountant, thanks in large part to her Shoreline College education and her degree in English Literature.
“I’ve really found that humanities are important,” she explained. “Because it teaches you how to think.”
Prior to attending Shoreline College, Suzanne’s experience in high school had left her bored and uninspired, with no interest in continuing her formal education. However, her parents insisted, pushing her to try community college. She liked the literature classes in high school, so she signed up for some at Shoreline College.
“I was not wanting to go to school. Shoreline changed that, completely. I remember on the first day Professor Amy Mates got up and started talking about books as though they were accessible, approachable, and applicable to the time we were in. And she challenged me; she was probably the first teacher I’ve ever had who made me work up to my level.”
It was Amy Mates who challenged Suzanne to provide a strong evidence-based foundation supporting her findings in her research papers, a lesson Suzanne carried with her throughout her career.
“She was the first person who had ever said ‘Do this. You’re capable. You’re good at it. Do it.’ And I did. I thrived in her classes.”
Shoreline College opened Suzanne to new ways of thinking, new ways of processing information.
“Eva Hagemeyer’s logic class was one of the pivotal courses that I took. It turned algebra into words. Math was never my strong suit, but her class taught that if you have X and you have Y, then the response is Z. Then she would give a phrase, and say, ‘if X is this, and if the response is Z, what’s missing?’ Suddenly that made sense to me: you could treat words the same way you treat numbers.”
By the time Suzanne transferred to Western Washington University, she had gained a new process for structuring her thoughts, and a newfound passion for learning.
“I was talking to the English advisor at Western and he said I was better prepared than somebody who would have studied at Western for two years. He said, ‘I’m going to make you take the poetry class and I’m going to make you take American Literature, because, frankly, I can’t waive everything.’”
After graduation, Suzanne worked as an administrative assistant for a CFO, working on bookkeeping and other complicated projects. Thanks to the foundation established by Professors Mates and Hagemeyer, she discovered she now had a knack, and even a fondness, for numbers.
Eventually she rose to become a Senior Accountant, building each of her projects from the ground up, establishing a firm base of support, checking and re-checking the evidence; not trusting things at face value but instead digging deeper to find the core meaning, just as Professor Mates had taught her to do.
“Every job I’ve had has added something, and I’ve always believed that you never stop learning.”
Over time, Suzanne developed a strong professional reputation as a problems solver, a forensic accountant who could find the base structures and build the systems from there. So, when Shoreline College needed help repairing the Foundation’s accounting data, Suzanne got the call.
“It’s full circle! It really is kind of funny because the whole thing started at Shoreline College with that deep dive into research papers and discovering that I loved it. I loved putting that kind of data together.”
Indeed, Suzanne found quite a complicated puzzle when she arrived back at Shoreline College, but by slowly putting the pieces together – audit reports, bank statements, tracking spreadsheets, and paper hardcopies – she successfully rebuilt the Foundation’s accounts to the cleanest they’d been in years. And clean audit after clean audit have proved that her techniques, forged in the Literature classes she took with Professor Amy Mates at Shoreline College, have set her up for success.
“It’s been fun being back at the college and to be able to help the college that literally started my life. It really has a lot to do with that love of learning Amy instilled, because up until then, I was just surviving my education. After Shoreline, learning became a real love.”