Meet CalCPA's Incoming Chair From the Jewel of the Sierra to the City of Angels.

CalCPA Chair Tayiika M. Dennis Principal, Nonprofit Services CLA LLP

CalCPA Chair Tayiika M. Dennis grew up in South Lake Tahoe, which turns out to be a contributing factor to a "full circle" type of moment for her when she was installed in that position at the CalCPA Council meeting held in Lake Tahoe in late July.

Dennis's family is originally from the Alameda-Oakland region of the Bay Area and lived between there and Lake Tahoe when she was really young. "My grandmother was a traveling nurse and had a second house in Tahoe," she says. From the age of 5 onward, she lived in Tahoe permanently. "It's a small town. You go to the grocery store, and you see your elementary teacher---just one of those towns."

She attended South Tahoe High School and says, looking back, she feels lucky about the childhood she had. "I had a very innocent childhood. We had a basketball hoop at our house and we were the most popular house in the neighborhood--one of those places where everyone hung out. My grandmother and my mother would always feed everybody. The entire neighborhood would come to our birthday parties and other events."

Dennis graduated high school and headed to UCLA. "I basically came to UCLA and never left Los Angeles" (she's a principal at CLA LLP, boasting more man 20 years of experience in both private and public accounting with an emphasis in the nonprofit world). She admits her family was a little worried about her going from small town with a population of 22,000, to UCLA where the campus had 36,000 people.

"They were like, 'Wait, can you do this?' But I was able to do so, lived in the dorms the first couple of years, got my first car my junior year. And I was afraid of the freeways. I used to take Sepulveda because you can take Sepulveda all the way to the Valley. I really loved Tahoe and it's a beautiful place, but I guess LA is now my home."

Finding Accounting

Dennis started at UCLA in a pre-nursing program. "My mother is a nurse, my grandmother, a nurse. And I'm the oldest of four. I have two sisters and a brother; one of my sisters is a nurse, so there's like a nurse gene that works and runs through the family. So, I started pre-nursing and realized very quickly that I should not be a nurse. I did OK in classes like biology, psychology, etc.--but I really don't like blood. So that was that."

Through her experience with the general course requirement, Dennis discovered accounting via economics. "I got my first A at UCLA--an easy A--in...