By Kalkidan Tewodros (QST’21)
CCD: Tell us about your experience. What were your responsibilities?
This summer, I was an Internal Firm Services Intern in the Los Angeles PwC office. Throughout the 8 weeks, I had the opportunity to attend National Start Training in Atlanta, Georgia, where I networked with all 650 individuals in the program, as well as professionals from all lines of services in all positions across the nation. After my internship officially began on June 15th, my summer was a mix of four different things— Digital Upskilling, exploring different lines of services through simulations, shadowing professionals, and working on an actual client engagement project with my assigned intern team.
I spent majority of my time working with my team on our assigned engagement. As part of the Digital Upskilling initiatives, we were trained on how to use softwares like Tableau and Alteryx to cleanse and analyze data, so it was really cool to assess real problems and be able to bring in outside research and expertise to supplement that. The culmination of the summer was to synthesize a report providing recommendations to our team’s two Senior Associates and Partner about how to best solve the clients issues.
My team and I worked ours out to allow for time to shadow professionals in the office as well, so I visited four different client sites to sit in on meetings between the auditors and the controllers/CFO’s of companies.
Additionally, I earned my Digital Acumen badge.
CCD: What was the most memorable moment of your experience?
The most memorable part of the experience was the relationships I built over cool programming. The firm did a lot to ensure we had opportunities to network with various groups of people, and made an effort to include interns.
I attended events with affinity groups, like the Black Inclusion Network, and bonded with my team and managers at Soul Cycling. We went to Disneyland for Promotion Day and a Dodgers games, but also did community service at the local LA Food Bank. Everyone in the office was so kind and willing to help me make the most of my time. Whether it was the BU alumni I reached out to on LinkedIn, the Senior Associates in charge of my team, the random professionals who gave me constant career coaching over “coffee dates”, the recruiters, or even members of my intern cohort– the people really made my summer amazing.
BU + Beyond 