Lou Petro honored for excellence in teaching

Home News Lou Petro honored for excellence in teaching
Lou Petro honored for excellence in teaching

accounting

Michigan Association of Certified Public Accountants awarded Adjunct Professor of Accounting Lou Petro as its most outstanding accounting professor of the year on Sept. 30. Petro received the Accounting Teaching Excellence Award.

“It was very funny at the awards banquet,” Petro said. “Almost every one of them was my old student.”

Petro started teaching accounting in 1969 and has taught at 11 different colleges. Hundreds of students became accounting professors like him, and at the banquet, they were pleased to speak well of him, how he was their best accounting teacher ever.

Professor of Accounting Michael Sweeney was also influenced by Petro. Sweeney met Petro during his senior year at Aquinas College while he was a teaching assistant at University of Detroit Mercy.

“I have known Lou for over thirty-five years; as a teacher, as a boss, as a colleague, as a mentor and as a friend,” Sweeney said. “He remains one of the brightest people I know, not only current in his many areas of expertise but also well-read in a variety of different fields outside of his academic and professional pursuits.”

Sweeney explained that he could not think of anyone more deserving of the MICPA Accounting Teaching Excellence Award than Petro since he was able to hone his teaching skills based on Petro’s example. So he wrote the letter of recommendations to the Awards Committee for him.

Petro also showed thanks to Sweeney.

“I decided to teach at Hillsdale because of Mike. I would have not had the award if he did not nominate me,” he said.

Petro, who is also a professor at Lawrence Technological University, started teaching at Hillsdale in 2003. He thinks the Hillsdale experience helped to be awarded.

“It is easy to care about students’ learning if the students are committed to it. I want to teach at the place where students have interests,” he said. “And Hillsdale is that place.”

“His primary focus is always the students; making decisions that are in their best interests,” Sweeney added. “He likes our students and enjoys interacting with them.”

Petro opened his Fraud Accounting class at Hillsdale in 2009, offering it in every spring term. He teaches how to prevent, detect, and investigate fraud, which are the preparations to become a Certified Fraud Examiner.

“I love Hillsdale a lot. Students are very capable and doing the job,” he said.

Petro thinks the award was not by his credit, but it was by his students.

“Better the students are, the better you are going to be as a teacher,” he said.