CFO & VP of Finance / University of Arkansas System / Little Rock
Gina Terry moved to Fayetteville when she was 10. Her father was a football coach at the University of Arkansas for 20 years, and she earned her bachelor’s degree in business administration from the school. “So my roots with the university go very deep,” Terry said.
After a nearly 20-year detour, she landed back at her alma mater, in a sense, although her office is in Little Rock. Terry keeps the University of Arkansas System’s finances in check, as CFO and vice president of finance.
“As soon as I got here, it was like, hit the ground running and go as fast as you can,” she said.
What she likes most about what she does is the degree of certainty it offers. “We have a lot of standards and interpretations, and there’s judgment involved in anything that we do, but there’s usually a pretty much right answer in accounting,” Terry said. “There’s not a lot of ‘It could be this, or it could be that.’”
High school is when she was introduced to accounting, and Terry’s brother is the one who encouraged her to pursue it as a career. “I was good at math, and I was a really good student,” Terry said. “It was very easy for me.”
After she graduated from the UA, Terry worked for Ernst & Young for 13 years. She conducted audits and recruited talent, and was the first employee in Little Rock to use the firm’s flexible work schedule as she started her family.
She later moved on to Nite Light Co. in Little Rock, where she was controller for six years.
And then Terry’s former husband, who works at UA Little Rock, told her about a job in internal audit at the system level. The rest is history.
Outside the office, she is a self-described “workout addict,” a sustaining member of the Junior League of Little Rock and stays involved in the community through her church, Second Presbyterian.
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