PwC — also known as PricewaterhouseCoopers and one of the four largest accounting firms in the world —has a new risk assurance associate. She is 2017 Seattle Pacific University graduate Lindsey Haynes, and to say she is filled with confidence would be an understatement.
Her self-assurance took flight in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at Air Academy High School. She thrived at the only high school in America on the grounds of a military academy (U.S. Air Force Academy) and one of Colorado’s top 10 high schools for academic achievement.
Lindsey emerged from high school with a GPA higher than 3.8, which helped earn her the $18,000 President’s Scholar Award from Seattle Pacific, renewable all four years. She was a magna cum laude graduate from SPU.
Confidence begets confidence. Lindsey’s mother, the first in her family to attend college and graduate with an associate’s degree in business, promised Lindsey’s grandfather shortly before he died that she would see to it that Lindsey and her older brother and sister earned college degrees. The youngest Haynes fulfilled that promise, making her SPU diploma all the more special.
Confidence further strengthened Lindsey in her last two years of college with scholarships generated by three named endowments: the Joanne Markowitz Chinn Memorial Scholarship Endowment, the Betty L. Corson Alumnae Falconettes Scholarship Endowment, and the Jan Higbee Falconette Scholarship Endowment.
“The donors who established those and other endowments believed in the future of SPU,” says Lindsey. “I could not have gone to SPU without that help.” Inspired by their generosity, Lindsey plans to help others just as those donors provided for her when she is financially able.
Her No. 1 recommendation for confidence-building toward college success? “Study abroad,” she says. She spent Autumn Quarter of her junior year living with a host family and studying business in Salzburg, Austria. She appreciated the historic beauty of Mirabell Gardens, Salzburg Castle, and the Alps.
The trip in 2015 also afforded a particularly dramatic backdrop to the escalating Syrian refugee crisis. Through three research papers in international conflict resolution, international human rights, and international management, Lindsey wrote about the causes of the Syrian Civil War, Syrian refugees’ flight from Turkey, and the European Union’s management of the refugee crisis. She then lived out the academic exercise by making sandwiches, distributing clothes, and escorting people from intake centers to refugee camps under the auspices of the Catholic aid agency Caritas Internationalis.
“It was incredibly eye-opening,” says Lindsey. “Although it was heartbreaking, it made my study abroad experience more impactful and memorable.” In the process, she tapped yet another well of confidence. Over Christmas break of 2016–17, she and 17 other students traveled to New Zealand with accounting professor Ross Stewart and associate professor of chemistry Daniel Schofield for their global seminar: “Climate Change: Chemical Basis and Financial Accountability.” Both men are native kiwis and provided unique personal insight into their homeland.
Lindsey finds contentment in a good pasta with garlic bread, or in making trouble for an opposing team. As an SPU Falcon, she estimates she was on 20 different intramural sports teams. In floor hockey, her team took the championship. But perhaps nowhere was her growing confidence more deeply felt than in taking ownership of her Christian faith.
“I had SPU professors willing to talk about faith and who demonstrated what it means to bring one’s faith to work,” says Lindsey, who hopes to one day be employed in one of PwC’s many international offices, maybe even the one in Auckland, New Zealand.
