Audit Associate - Summer Intern Review

I did really enjoy my internship as a whole. Although I don't think I want to pursue it as a career, it has at least helped my in my career development path as it's as useful to rule jobs out as it is to decide I might be interested further in them. It has been a huge learning experience overall and am thoroughly glad I did it.

I felt valued by my colleagues and felt I was treated no differently to someone who was there as a full time employee. Everyone was very welcoming in the team and always asked how I was getting on. They gave me tasks which contributed towards client work and I felt that I was not just there to do photocopying, make tea etc.

The managers and supervisors in the team are very friendly and helpful. No matter how busy they may be, I have always been able to ask them for help when I needed to. Sometimes, it is difficult to differentiate between managers/supervisors and other colleagues. This is because they are always around to help with work or even just have a friendly, informal chat,

This varied depending on the team and job you were on. For the first couple weeks of the internship I felt I was the right level of busy and always had tasks to be getting on with but there was never the expectation that I needed to be doing work after 5pm - they always let me leave on time. However towards the end of the internship, I felt the work was getting less frequent despite me asking for more and I often found myself at a loss what to do.

I was given a lot of responsibility for client work. Work that I completed was contributing towards the client and I felt that I was assisting my colleagues, rather than hindering them in regards to reducing their workload as I could take the simpler tasks off them to complete. I was also allowed to email/phone the clients without it being checked by my colleagues first.

Very little if I'm honest. Although my degree is somewhat related, I would say that very little to none of the technical things I learnt whilst doing this internship could be applied to my academic studies. I think perhaps it is the improvement in soft skills such as communication and working as a team will be more important in regards to the future.

Generally, everyone was very friendly in the office towards me. Members of staff would say hello and smile at me, whilst colleagues I had worked with previously in the internship would make every effort to catch up with me to see how it was all going. Some days it was relatively quiet and serious in the office, but I think that was just a reflection of people concentrating on their work.

Overall I felt it was well organised in terms to the run up to the start of internship. Grad recruitment were very good of keeping me informed right through the application progress right up to the very first day of starting. However I felt the office I worked for were slightly less organised with regards to the internship scheme.

I would say KPMG as a firm were very good at personal development. There are lots of opportunities for training, either in the form of online modules or delivered in person. There is also Corporate social responsibility days and each staff member is given half a day a month to participate in a CSR event.

If you were interested in pursuing a grad role at KPMG, the internship over the summer is a great way to secure a place on the grad scheme as the chance of being offered a job is extremely high, provided the feedback you receive from your managers is good enough. However I am sure that you do not need to have done the internship to secure a grad role, many come in from other backgrounds.

I think this could have been organised slightly better by student recruitment. Compared to another work experience I had done, there were very few events organised for the interns to do together. I know it is important to get as much experience as possible doing the actual job but I would have liked more time with the other interns.

I feel any internship outside the South east of England is going to be reasonably priced in comparison. Cost of living is very reasonable plus any expenses incurred during working hours such as travel and lunches was reimbursed by KPMG. Plus the pay for the internship went a long way in regards to paying for living costs.

As the internship was in the centre of Birmingham there are countless options for Nightlife. Even though I didn't go out much during my internship, if you wanted to, there are definitely lots of affordable student friendly places in the city centre that you could go to on a Friday/Saturday.

Yes there were many opportunities to get involved in other activities but I didn't choose to. I think this is just my personal choice and if you were interested you could get involved in more of the societies. Also as the internship as fairly short (4 weeks) I felt it was not really worth my while joining any of the events organised.