Assurance Intern Review

I found the internship insightful as I had the chance to learn about several elements of accounting, and also to interact with a diverse range of clients. I received a lot of support from my senior colleagues as well. Only disadvantage was that the social side of the internship was not too exciting.

I would say a lot. Accounting and auditing are very complicated, and unless you have received intense training, it was challenging to grasp the ideas of many tasks involved in the process. I asked many questions throughout my internship, and always received very detailed explanations and I have learnt a lot from them.

As I have mentioned, I received a lot of support during the time I worked on auditing as there were a number of complicated elements in accounting I couldn't understand. The Senior Associates (or in-charges) were always willing to help me when I came across difficulties. Sometimes, however, they would get quite busy so it could be a little challenging to ask too much.

Depends on the clients I worked on. Some clients were approaching fiscal year end and were listed companies, thus the auditing process was intense, especially when they had a lot of entities. Some clients, however, had most of their accounts audited already so there was not much work to do.

Quite a decent amount. I was assigned to do some testing on deferred revenues, consolidation and prepayments, and for a few of them I had to carry out them independently (a senior colleague would have a check afterwards). This meant talking to clients, checking invoices and contracts to extract information. I was treated as an official employee within the team.

At the moment, I am taking an Advanced Accounting course with a lot of advanced knowledge. The knowledge I learnt during the internship actually applied quite a lot to my course, and it was helpful being able to see the theories in practical work. Moreover, I improved my soft skills immensely.

I was rarely in the office as the characteristics of auditing work means that you have to travel very often to communicate with the client directly. When I had the chance to, however, the office can be a bit empty as the office was a bit small and everyone was either away for job or on study leave.

The organisation of the internship could have been better. Before each Monday, we had to check on the schedule to find out which clients we would be working with. However, sometimes, the schedule either got mixed up or we wouldn't know anything until the weekend. This could cause problems if you have to travel far away to work.

The induction was well organised, where we spent 3 days in a hotel in Windsor in order to have training. The training involved intense training of basic accounting principles, and we were given a booklet of exercises and theories to understand more about the work we expected to do. There were also teamwork exercises to improve soft skills, and talks from the partners to help us learn more about PwC. During the internship, there would be feedback from the team on each assignment I worked on.

Very appealing. During the internship, there would be a People Manager (or Career Coach) assigned to each intern. The Manager will review and assess the feedbacks from all the assignments and discussed with the senior partner to decide whether the interns were able to convert the internship into a graduate job. I received a job offer, which helped me feel really relieved during my final year as job seeking wouldn't be really stressful.

There were a few socials organised during the internship, but not too often (about 3 times within 6 weeks). I also rarely met the other interns as everyone was always away for work. The social events were diverse, however, ranging from lunch in the pub to a picnic to watch a play.

Cambridge can be very costly, only slightly cheaper from London, especially with regards to renting. Socialising was not that costly on the other hand.

I did not have the chance to explore the nightlife much in Cambridge. There were a few pubs and bars around in the town, one main disadvantage of Cambridge was that the transport could be very misleading in terms of schedule and timing, which meant it would be quite hard for me to travel back home in late night.

Not a lot. The work could be very busy, sometimes I had to work overtime or travelling back from client site could take a while so I was not able to join any activities outside work at all.