For nearly ten years, NIU’s Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) has hired a graduate accounting student each year to work with the Association Management team and their nonprofit client, the American Planning Association-Illinois Chapter (APA-IL), as well as to assist other nonprofit associations. The collaboration has been a win-win, helping students experience accounting from the client perspective while providing high-quality bookkeeping and financial review to associations of public service professionals.
Maddison Gentry, CGS Graduate Assistant
Maddison Gentry, who worked as a CGS graduate assistant for the 2025-26 school year, says her CGS experience helped her understand the daily complexities of bookkeeping from the client’s perspective. Gentry earned her undergraduate degree in accounting from NIU after attending her local community college. She completed her master’s degree in accounting in May 2026 and is currently studying for her Certified Public Accountant exam. In 2027 Gentry will begin working as an auditor for the accounting firm where she interned earlier in her schooling.
“One thing we talk a lot about in audit classes is understanding the client and understanding their controls and processes,” Gentry says. “I feel like working with CGS, I learned what is meant by that. Being on the client side, I can see where all our transactions are processed, how we record things and how we handle cash disbursements, for example. It was great to see the complexities of those processes day-to-day. It turns out, it’s more complex than you might expect!”
Gentry says she enjoyed the learning process of working with many different payment processing platforms, which is now common across businesses and nonprofit organizations.
“I was surprised by how many different platforms a business can use to process transactions,” she says. “Sometimes, a single transaction will go through two different payment processing companies! It was a bit challenging because, if I was doing month-end procedures, sometimes the transaction would be processed through one of the companies but not the other. Things would get out of balance, and I’d be looking for one number that’s throwing everything off. It can lead you on a goose chase sometimes, but it was fun. I sometimes felt like a detective.”
Paula Freeze, CGS Research Specialist and APA-IL Executive Director
CGS Research Specialist and APA-IL Executive Director Paula Freeze says this meeting of theory and practice was one of the goals of bringing in a graduate assistant bookkeeper. While the student gains experience with the daily realities of accounting at a nonprofit association, the CGS Association Management team benefits from the expertise of the students, who have already completed their undergraduate degrees and accounting internships.
[Read our full story in NIU Today to learn more.]
