The extraordinary individuals who met the criteria for the award were selected from 74,000 test takers who sat for the CPA Exam in 2024.

“The Elijah Watt Sells Award represents one of the highest honors in the CPA profession, and this year’s recipients are not only technically exceptional, they are also poised to shape the future of the profession. As the accounting landscape evolves, their leadership, integrity, and drive for excellence will play a vital role in upholding public trust and guiding businesses through complexity and change,” said Susan Coffey, CPA, CGMA, CEO of public accounting at the AICPA.

A Love of Logic Propels an Accounting Career

Esther Drillick earned her Bachelor of Science in accounting at Touro University’s Lander College of Arts & Sciences and is currently employed as a fiscal officer with YVY ECC in Brooklyn.

Drillick, a graduate of Bais Yaakov D’Rav Meir and Mesores Rochel Seminary in Israel, chose accounting because she loves logic and math. She chose Touro because she wanted a school with “a great academic reputation and a Jewish environment.”

Drillick’s father is a hedge fund manager, one grandfather is a CPA and the other held a PhD in mathematics and so coming from a numbers-driven family, it was no surprise that she took to the field right away. She appreciated the rigorous accounting program at Touro that ultimately prepared her for the CPA exam. She was amazed as she began studying for the CPA—a process that took her a full year—that there was very little new material on the test. “It was mostly a review of what I had learned at Touro,” says Drillick.

She took three months to study for each part of the exam and when she saw how well she did on the first part, she thought about trying for the award but at first, didn’t think she wanted the pressure. After taking the second part of the exam and scoring quite well, she thought “maybe I should go for it! I decided then to challenge myself to achieve this goal. At that point, I just had this feeling I could do it,” shares Drillick. “I had a lot of support as my whole family was rooting for me.”

One of the professors who used simulated CPA exams in his homework and classwork and truly prepared students for the high-stakes test was an Elijah Watts Sells Award winner himself. Professor Shulem Rosenbaum, now a partner at Roth & Co, was one of Touro’s previous winners of this prestigious national award over a decade ago.

According to Drillick, “Professor Rosenbaum and all of my accounting professors really cared about the success of their students. Not just in terms of learning the material, but also in terms of networking and finding internships and jobs and building our careers. They always offered students the opportunity to reach out and ask for help in any way they needed.”

Today, as a fiscal officer at YVY ECC, a nonprofit organization that receives many government grants, she ensures compliance with various regulations and performs monthly and annual reporting to government agencies. She’s learning to anticipate issues before they arise and to think like an auditor. As for the future, Drillick says she enjoys the private sector and will likely stay there.

"Esther’s stellar achievement on the Uniform CPA Examination is a reflection of her intellectual acumen and drive to excel, as well as the quality and rigor of the CPA program offered at Touro,” said Dr. Robert Goldschmidt, Executive Dean of Lander College of Arts & Sciences in Flatbush.

About the Elijah Watts Sells Award

The Elijah Watt Sells Award program was established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1923 to recognize outstanding performance on the CPA Exam, as well as to honor Sells, one of the country’s first CPAs. A founding member of the firm now known as Deloitte, Sells was active in the establishment of the AICPA.