I had never realized my enthusiasm for mathematics until I met my first-grade high school teacher. Her special methodology for solving math problems inspired me and evoked my passion for numbers. After taking her class, I chose mathematics as my major in high school and I got graduated from high school as the top student in my class.
I grew up in a family with an accounting background. My father who has always been my mentor and role model completed his Ph.D. in accounting in 2000 and serves now as the Head of Audit at the Iranian National Tax Administration. Right now, He teaches accounting and financial reporting at Tabriz Azad University. He encouraged me and my sister to choose accounting as our major in college. In Iran, we have to sit for a national entrance exam to get admitted into public universities and an accounting major is one of the very competitive ones. I ranked in the top 7th percentiles among my cohort in 2014 and that allowed me to choose accounting as my major at Urmia University, which is one the best universities in Iran, with a full undergraduate scholarship. I graduated with a cumulative GPA of 3.6 out of 4 as one of the top students. Due to my excellent grades, I was offered a merit-based admission to pursue my master’s degree in accounting at the same university without having to sit for the Iranian National University Exam for a master’s degree. But since I was very ambitious and wanted to get admitted into another university, I decided to take the entrance exam anyways.
I was ranked number 13 among all students who took the exam nationwide in my cohort (more than 500,000 students). I got admitted to Allameh Tabataba’i University which is the best accounting program in Iran. Being admitted to this university for my master’s degree was like a dream come true. Working with my sister Atousa, as she was accepted to the same university one year ahead of me and Ph.D. student in accounting at Kentucky University., and several professors and other graduate students on different research projects gave me an opportunity to learn about accounting research. Actually, Atousa inspired me to study harder and learn more about different research topics which helped me to choose the archival research on the effect of financial reporting and its quality in capital markets as the topic I am most interested in. In order to improve my research skills, I voluntarily participated in many workshops and presentations in Machine Learning, statistical analysis software such as EViews, SPSS, and programming skills such as Python, R, and SQL Developer.
For my master’s degree dissertation, I studied the effect of having women on corporate boards on the quality of monitoring tasks, as an empirical examination of Kanter’s theory. The results of my study suggested that the effect of having women as board members on the quality of the boards’ monitoring tasks is positive and statistically significant when the percentage of female directors reaches the threshold of 33%. I also worked on a paper co-authored with Ali Hassan Baklu and my sister, Atousa Kheirollahi, titled “Internal Auditing and Data Mining with the application of Artificial Intelligence” published in at the Iranian Internal Auditing Association conference in 2021 which was awarded the best paper presented.