Matt Peters
Director, International Tax, Cummins Inc.; Kelley Alumnus, BS, MBA and MSA degrees
“IUPUI’s mix of younger and older students helped me focus more on what I was there to do.”
If you really want to know what it’s like to be a student at Kelley Indianapolis, ask Matt Peters. He’s earned three degrees from the school, beginning with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance in 1995. Three years later, he returned to Kelley to pursue an MBA and wound up earning a Master of Science in Accounting degree at the same time.
“Because some of the courses required for the MBA overlapped with courses I’d already completed as an undergraduate, Dr. Kulsrud [program director for Kelley’s graduate-level accounting program] approached the dean about the possibility of creating a dual degree program for me,” Peters explains. “They worked out an arrangement for me to work on the MBA and MSA degrees simultaneously, and I was able to graduate with both in 2001.”
Finishing with two Kelley graduate degrees was just one of the highlights of Peters’ years at IUPUI. A native of Auburn, Indiana, he admits to being torn between attending college in Bloomington or Indianapolis, but in hindsight believes he made the right decision selecting IUPUI.
“It really turned out to be a good choice for me,” says Peters, who was active in the business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi while on campus. “IUPUI’s mix of younger and older students helped me focus more on what I was there to do.”
After leaving his first job at a small Indianapolis accounting firm, Peters worked at both Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as Conseco, before accepting his current position with Cummins in November 2005.
“I just happened to fall into the niche of financial accounting, working with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and FAS [Financial Accounting Standard] 109,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of people with that type of skill set, so it created a lot of opportunities for me.”
Specializing in international tax at Cummins, Peters has had an opportunity to travel overseas, participating in a world tour of sorts with visits to Brazil, China, the United Kingdom, Mexico, India and Australia. Although happy in his current assignment, Peters, who describes himself as a “lifer in tax,” says he wouldn’t mind heading up a corporate tax department some day. For now, however, his days at IUPUI appear to have come full circle. Recently, he joined other members of the Cummins finance department for some on-campus recruiting at Kelley Indianapolis.
“It was time well spent,” says Peters, adding his company offered full-time positions to four Kelley accounting graduates in the fall of 2007. “We had a really good turnout at IUPUI and identified a great candidate for the position we needed to fill.”
