Alumni Profiles

B.S., double major, accounting and business management, 2002

MBA, East Carolina University, 2004

Assistant State Auditor

N.C. Office of the State Auditor

Greenville, N.C.

To watch a video with Amy, click here.

“My life,” says Amy Evans, “is sports and math.” Talk to her at all and you’ll see how very true that is. As a young girl, when she earned an award for the highest math average in the 6th grade, she realized: “This is who I am. Accounting is my future.” She felt it in the 6th grade, and she feels it now.

But don’t think that accounting is alone in first place. Sports have always been right there, at every step. “I have been involved in organized sports since I was 5 years old,” Amy says, “and I still am. I watch all sports on TV, I talk about sports, I overanalyze sports — especially the World Cup and the NCAA Tournament.”

In fact, Amy chose to enroll at Guilford College because of sports. She states it simply: “The reason I went to Guilford was the opportunity to play two sports and receive a quality education.” She was named the Most Valuable Player of the Guilford College soccer team four times. She was the Best Defensive Player on the Guilford College basketball team three times. She served as captain of both the soccer and the basketball teams, and she was named ODAC Conference Women’s Soccer Player of the Year in 2001.

Of course, a complete list of her athletic awards fills several pages, and she did it all while also earning a Dean’s List GPA. It was a combination of talent, hard work and, as she’ll tell you, support from the Guilford College coaches and faculty members. “My coaches called professors to be sure that we, as athletes, were not just in class, but also participating and succeeding in all facets of our Guilford experience. The coaches and professors worked together to ensure that our practice and competition schedules were accommodated with minimal disruption to our academic progress.”

Amy says that the faculty members not only worked with the athletes to ensure that they kept up with assignments; many also went to the games/matches. “My academic advisers attended every home basketball and soccer game they could,” she says.

As you might expect, Amy invested some of her time helping others. She served as coach of a U-9 Soccer Team with the Greensboro Youth Soccer Association her sophomore year, and was an assistant soccer coach for the state champion Greensboro Day School team her senior year. For the past five years she has coached the ’91 Coastal United Girls Soccer Team (in the New Bern Soccer Association). “I love it so much,” she says. “I’m working on passing the CPA exam, and I still find time to coach two nights a week and travel to games on weekends.”

After graduating from Guilford College, Amy attended graduate school at East Carolina University, earning a master’s of business administration degree. “Thanks to Guilford College,” she says, “graduate school was much easier. I received great preparation for grad school both in my discipline and in writing papers. When ECU assigned us a 50-page paper to write, it did not intimidate me, but others freaked out.”

She adds that the most difficult thing about graduate school was learning not to call her professors by their first names. “Guilford had first-name familiarity engrained in me,” she says, “and I had to work to remember to tack the ‘Dr.’ on there at ECU.”

Amy admits that she is what she seems — a successful two-sport athlete/scholar (“with a social life,” she adds), but that she also is surprisingly open-minded, thanks to Guilford. “Guilford College forced me out of my comfort zone. You cannot hide in classrooms that small. You encounter and interact with a wide diversity of people, both individually and in organized ways, on a daily basis. I definitely had my values and ideals challenged while at Guilford.”

That experience fits with her advice to those considering Guilford as their college: “If you have high school students considering Guilford, tell them it’s gonna be a wild ride — they will encounter some of the greatest and most challenging times of their lives. They should come here with no expectations, just an open mind and heart.