Influential Woman · Accounting

Laura Jensen

Tax Senior, Deloitte

Chicopee, MA

1Award received

Certifications · Degrees · Memberships

Degree College degree in Accounting Cert CPA (in progress) Member CTCPA

Her Story

About Laura

I started my accounting career with internships in 2022 and 2023 while I was in college, and I've been working full-time at my firm for almost three years now. I began as staff and was promoted to Tax Senior about a year ago. As a senior, my day-to-day involves reviewing work that staff send to me, and a large part of my role is teaching and mentoring new staff members as they learn the firm, learn tax, and everything that goes with it. I work primarily in tax, but I also assist our audit team with the income tax portion of audits. My work varies significantly by season. During compliance season, it's very repetitive, doing the same things over and over. In the summer, I focus heavily on K-1s for partnership clients and then tax returns later. I'm currently working on my CPA certification and have one more exam to go, which has been taking a lot of my energy and free time while working full-time. Getting through some of those harder exams while working has been one of my proudest achievements so far.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Laura

01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?

I'd say definitely make connections in high school, even definitely college. The more people you talk to, the better, as long as you're having a good conversation. Making that network connection is the most important piece to me. I only got my job now because I was talking to my neighbor, and he was like, you know, telling me about opportunities. It's important to get your name out there to anybody you know. Networking really made all the difference in my career.

02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?

A lot of people are talking about AI phasing out some jobs and career opportunities, but realistically, if you got your college degree in accounting, you have so much job potential. I wouldn't let that deter you from majoring there or going into accounting as a profession. I don't think it's as advanced as everyone makes it out to be. At least in my job, there's been very few things that have been replaced by AI so far. They're always updating our technology, which is great and very helpful, but I wouldn't say that AI is actually affecting or replacing people. Also, at least for accounting, we're in a CPA shortage. I think it's such a great time to major in this in college, to join this now, even if you're career-changing. It's just such a great opportunity and industry to join. I think COVID accelerated the shortage with the great retiring or something like that. There were already more CPAs over a certain age than joining as college students anyway, and during COVID, more of them retired earlier, so there's really not enough of the new workers replacing them.

Keep Exploring