Associate Professor Erin Hall discusses an accounting exercise with one of her students. (Matthew Burns/Wake Tech)

Erin Hall is the first to admit she's bad at math.

"I always tell my students, 'If you're bad at math, we'll be bad together,'" Hall said.

What the associate professor of Accounting & Finance is good at – enough to earn a 2026 Wake Tech Excellence in Teaching Award – is working with numbers and showing students how to put together financial reports and balance sheets.

"[Accounting] is more about communicating things with people," she said. "It's a very black-and-white subject. Things have to balance and line up. Once I had that down, [it was] on to the next topic."

Hall says she got into accounting because of her father, who's an accountant. Although she had no career in mind, she planned to study business at Meredith College. He suggested that she take a course in financial accounting as an elective, and she was immediately hooked.

"It just clicked," she said. "I've never had anything that clicked like that. Everything made sense."

She went on to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in Accounting from Meredith and North Carolina State University, respectively. And she now sports a tattoo of an accounting equation on her wrist.

Hall wasn't interested in becoming a CPA, figuring she would spend all her time doing tax returns and audits. But she wound up doing just that while working for several CPA firms in the Triangle for 10 years.

Searching for a different outlet for her skills, she applied for what she thought was an adjunct teaching position at Wake Tech in 2018. When she was offered a full-time job instead, she felt she wasn't ready and initially turned it down. But Melanie Thomas, who later became department head for the Accounting & Finance program, persuaded her to change her mind.

"Now, I couldn't imagine doing anything else," Hall said. "I love being in the classroom and seeing the lightbulbs going off."

As a teacher, she finds community college to be the sweet spot.

"There's such a wide variety of students," she said. "Everybody brings something to the table, and we learn from each other."

Xavier Gonzalez, for example, is a Business Administration student who wanted to take an accounting class to help him prepare to run his own retail business. He says he enjoys the exercises Hall does with students to teach various concepts.

"I like her teaching style," Gonzalez said. "It's not death by PowerPoint."

Accounting student Darrik James agrees, adding that Hall provides mnemonic devices to help students remember formulas and other things.

"She explains everything very well," James said. "And she's very understanding if you have things come up outside of class."

Hall says she tries to encourage an interactive environment in her class to get everyone involved.

"You get as much out of it as you put in," she said.