Tax intern Review

In my placement, I was part of the tax service line and completed several short rotations. This was useful as I was able to understand at a high level the exact function of the various different tax teams. This, coupled with the office culture and the general attitude of PwC colleagues made my internship a hugely enjoyable one.

Buddy and People Manager systems help to build a strong relationship with a couple of senior colleagues with the service line. This allowed me to feel valued in both the work that I was doing and the questions that I had to ask. Student recruitment were also incredibly useful when it came to offering career advice and outlining next steps after the internship etc.

Any questions were always answered with care and well explained. Often, even just a curious query relating to the piece of work that I was working on would be given a lot of time by management/seniors in terms of them explaining the context of the work and offering advice on my query. This was great as it showed that despite colleagues and management having very busy schedules, they appreciate that internships are an important part of a person's development.

I joined at a reasonably quiet tax period, which when coupled with rotating around different teams rather than staying one fixed team, meant that sometimes I would find myself with not too much work on. Having said this, the days never went slow as even when there is no client work to do there is still plenty to do around the office, it is just a shame when some of these pieces of work are very administrative and do not really help with development.

It's difficult to put a scale on this, as in a company such as PwC you would never expect a huge amount of responsibility for client work whilst on a 6 week placement. I suppose there is a responsibility for yourself to make the most of the placement and get involved with different pieces of work, but in terms of work that is high in value this is at a premium for interns.

Working in a firm such as PwC will develop some kind of skills for everyone, I am confident of that. For me it was about developing the drive for results of perfectionist quality, as even some internal communications would be reviewed 4 or 5 times before being sent. It is easy to appreciate why PwC are so successful when you work there, because everything internal is done to such a high standard that it sets the bar for any external work, which is always checked and checked again to reach perfection. Working with this approach certainly developed my attention to detail.