Latest News
Both from Ohio, they started off as friends and then began dating toward the end of the school year, before Jon moved to Chicago to work in KPMG’s audit practice. They eventually got married and moved all over the Midwest and South for jobs for years before an opportunity to work at Miami University came up. As a Miami graduate, Jon said “it was like a dream come true.”
CPA Love Story: Next-door neighbors turned husband and wife
Written on Feb 23, 2023
By Jessica Salerno-Shumaker, OSCPA senior content manager
When Jon and Amanda Pyzoha started dating in 2004 while attending Miami University, they were surprised to find out they both were following dreams of an accounting career.
“Jon was starting his master's program,” Amanda said. “I was a junior in undergrad and we were neighbors off campus. So even though we were both accounting majors, we never had any classes together. But we got to know each other from our houses being next door.”
Both from Ohio, they started off as friends and then began dating toward the end of the school year, before Jon moved to Chicago to work in KPMG’s audit practice. They eventually got married and moved all over the Midwest and South for jobs for years before an opportunity to work at Miami University came up. As a Miami graduate, Jon said “it was like a dream come true.” They’ve now lived in Cincinnati for seven years with their three children, where Jon is an associate professor in accountancy at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University and Amanda is the EY professional development advisor in the same department.
Accounting has a regular presence in their everyday conversations thanks to the nature of their jobs. Amanda said when they were younger, they used to talk about the technical aspects of accounting more to help better understand the profession and working in the real world.
“Now we don't talk about debits and credits every day,” Jon said, with a laugh. “But we do talk about students and classes and how the profession is changing, so in a way, we talk about it all the time.”
Although now they talk about accounting regularly, neither had chosen accounting as their major when starting out at Miami. Jon was a computer science major, and Amanda was initially pre-med. But upon taking some science classes and considering how long she would be in school, she decided to join the business school. After taking intro to accounting, a conversation with a professor piqued her interest further.
“The professor took the time to kind of explain to me all the different career options and what you could do with it,” she said. “And I really like just the flexibility like that it could, it could literally go anywhere with you.”
And while neither said they would have guessed they would marry a fellow accountant; they appreciate being with someone who knows the profession well.
“It's very nice to be able to talk to someone about your day-to-day and really understand it,” Amanda said. “So I'm glad that it all worked out.”
[Photo credit: Greene Peas in a Pod]