Identical twins graduate side by side with accounting degrees
Mariya and Polina Giganova plan to rack up accounts receivable building a real estate business together.
Whether they’re sitting in an accounting class, showing a home to potential buyers or picking up graduation gowns, Polina and Mariya Giganova are hard to miss.
The identical twins, who will graduate with matching degrees in Accounting this month, don’t just share hair and eye color. Throughout their time at Metropolitan State University of Denver, the two have often taken the same classes at the same time, worn the same clothes and finished each other’s sentences. One professor even nicknamed them The Wonder Twins.
When they stopped by St. Cajetan’s to collect graduation regalia on an April morning, they weren’t just wearing matching jeans, white shirts and shoes, they also wore the same rhinestone watches and blingy hoop earrings.
They don’t always dress identically, Mariya Giganova said. But often, like that morning, they’re just on the same wavelength. “We woke up and we both knew what we wanted to wear, and it was the same thing.”
And, she pointed out, there are subtle differences. “Polina has bigger eyebrows.”
They also know what they want to do after graduation, and — you guessed it — their goals are the same. In fact, they plan to work together. The sisters, who emigrated with their family from Kazakhstan when they were 12, have worked throughout the time they’ve been in college.
During their first two years at MSU Denver, they worked at accounting jobs. More recently, they launched careers in real estate. They credit the University’s flexibility with helping them make that busy schedule work. “Here at MSU Denver they make it possible for you to balance school with work. We worked while studying, and that helped us a lot,” Polina Giganova said. “Here you can balance both.”
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They want to continue working in real estate.
“We like meeting people. A lot of people work at real estate as a side hustle. We want to change that,” Mariya Giganova said.
When it came time to decide on a college major, “We thought, ‘How can we best serve our clients?’” she said.
Accounting became the obvious answer, they said, because it allows them to do more than just show houses. With that dollars-and-cents knowledge, they can guide clients on the financial and investment aspect of property ownership.
They found that MSU Denver offered plenty of pathways to real-world work experience and to make connections in their field.
“There are lots of opportunities here,” Polina Giganova said.
The twins participated in a commercial real estate development program, offered through MSU Denver’s Real Estate Club, that focused on financial analysis, networking and professional development, all while learning from real estate professionals and meeting students from universities across Colorado.
“We made a lot of friends there that we’re still in contact with today. It was an amazing program,” Mariya Giganova said.
Eventually, they hope to earn master’s degrees in taxation, but in the immediate future they’ll take what, for them, amounts to a break — just working full time without taking any classes.
Wherever the future takes them, one thing is certain: They’ll go there together. Twins run in their family, Polina Giganova said. “Our grandfather is a twin, and our older sister is having twins in August.”
Being a twin “is like having a built-in best friend,” she said. “We were given such a gift.”
