Bryant Assistant Professor of Accounting Muni Kelly, Ph.D. is the first to note she’s a quiet person. She’s always been reserved — much more comfortable working behind the scenes, as both an accountant and as an educator.

But quiet does not mean weak, or passive. Her life has been marked by a determination to grow, to succeed, and to explore — a drive she is now determined to impart in her students.

“My sky has no limit,” she proclaims.

Born in Ghana to a policewoman and an Air Force captain Kelly learned responsibility at an early age. “It became important to me that, in everything I did, I did it as well as I possibly could,” she recalls.

As the seventh child of 13, she took a role in helping to raise her young siblings. “It allowed me to grow really fast,” Kelly muses. She also gained a lot of experience reminding people to do their homework, she notes with a smile.

Her father’s career required the family to travel for work and Kelly and her siblings joined him across Ghana, picking up languages and learning to adjust to different cultures — which would serve her well in a life marked by travel and exploration.

She found other ways to feed her voracious need for knowledge as well. “I wouldn't go out to play. I would stay and read, and I would read anything that I would find my hands on,” she says.

After finishing boarding school, Kelly returned home and entered the workforce while she considered what she would do with her life. “I worked a little bit in sales, a little bit in marketing, a little bit in office management,” she states. “I taught myself a lot of things — some of which I teach my own students today.”

She enjoyed the work but wanted more and became the first of her siblings to go on to college. Her father, she notes, encouraged her every step of her journey. “He would always say, ‘You must support your child in every way you can, and give them everything they need, but their decision about what to do is up to them,’” Kelly remembers.

Since then, several of her other siblings have gone on to college, Kelly notes. “It’s just that someone needed to be first.”

At Ghana’s Regent University College of Science and Technology, she studied banking and finance. “I wanted a small space where I could feel comfortable,” Kelly explains. “As a private university, Regent provided me with that.”

That supportive community was especially challenging as she sought to chart her own path.  

“I was doing something that nobody else in my family had done, so it was quite challenging for me sometimes to navigate my way. I didn't know even what a GPA was!” Kelly says.

But that doesn’t mean she didn’t seek to test herself. She began college as a full-time student but found she was bored with class as her only outlet. “My day would be over by 3 p.m.,” she said with a smile. “I felt I could do so much more.” Instead, she worked for a Chinese Import/Export company as an office manager and bookkeeper and then took a job as an assistant to a project management team for a construction company — all while taking classes at night. “The office would close around five and I would have to be at class around six,” she recalls.

“Looking back, I see now that it was a lot,” says Kelly, who excelled in her studies. “But it didn’t feel like it at the time because I enjoyed what I was doing.”

After graduation, she went to work with the British Council, which specializes in creating international cultural and educational opportunities in over 100 countries. There, she began the accounting work that would become her calling and discovered her love of managerial accounting.

“What I love about accounting is we tend to not be seen in the background, which fits my personality really well,” says Kelly. “But a company's ability to survive into the future really depends on how well we manage the company's finances and resources.”

Her natural curiosity also led her to explore other areas as well. “I was working with the finance and accounting team, but I also tended to be kind of everywhere else,” she says. “Anything I wasn’t familiar with, I knew I could learn.”

Though her work with the British Council, Kelly traveled to several countries in a variety of capacities, from working with community organizations to supporting schools to assisting with workshops for small businesses and entrepreneurs. But she wanted to push her boundaries even further.

“I wanted to experience what was outside of Africa as well,” she states.

“I had discovered that I love helping people learn and find what they need.”

Eventually, Kelly decided she would pursue a graduate degree in the United States — but that came with its own challenges. She studied with guides sent over from the United States and the only GMAT testing facility was three countries over in Nigeria.

She persevered, however, and was accepted to Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, on a full scholarship. From adapting to her new home’s food — “During my first week, I only drank beverages. I don’t think I ate anything,” she recalls — to learning the subtleties of communication in a new culture, she embraced life in the United States. Morgan’s vibrant and diverse community of international students facilitated her transition into American culture and the blend of familiar cultural elements from her background and new experiences in the U.S. allowed her to adapt more smoothly.

As part of her graduate assistantship, she was assigned to the University library, where she contributed to a special project involving forensic accounting. The Assistant Library Director took notice of her work and offered her a position, which she continued to hold even after graduation.

Kelly’s plan had always been to earn her MBA and return home to Ghana, where she would perhaps start her own business. But when a friend recommended that she go further and earn her Ph.D., she decided to stay in the United States — and earned her doctorate in less than four years.

From there, Kelly began to look for jobs in academia. “I had discovered that I love helping people learn and find what they need,” she noted.

One school in particular caught her attention, she remembers. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, most schools had moved their interview process to Zoom. Bryant University, however, welcomed her to campus, says Kelly.

“If another human being was able to do it, well, you are a human too.”

Used to warmer climes, Kelly remembered visiting Connecticut in 2015, just in time for a brutal winter season that wracked the Northeast. She had no wish to relive that, she laughed.

But when she arrived on Bryant’s campus, she was won over by the university’s close-knit community, which reminded her of Regent. With the warm reception she had received, perhaps the cold wouldn’t bother her anyway, she decided.

At Bryant, Kelly’s coursework involves case studies that bring the real world into the classroom — a reflection of a career spent learning by doing — and extends from accounting information services to managerial accounting, where students learn how financial information can help managers make informed decisions about a company's performance, costs, and future strategies.

Kelly’s research primarily focuses on financial reporting quality and regulations, but she is also deeply engaged in exploring gender diversity in the workplace. That extends to investigating why there are so few women in the accounting profession — and what can be done to fix that ratio.

“We’ve built a silo around the accounting profession,” Kelly muses. “It can be hard to break in and hard to even understand what a career in accounting entails. I think that going even beyond just trying to attract women; we need to try to take away that kind of secrecy.”

After all, she notes, it comes down to a simple truth, one that’s guided Kelly her whole life: “If another human being was able to do it, well, you are a human too.”