Intern Review

I really enjoyed the placement. It was a great insight into Audit, and the professional services industry in general. I was given plenty of responsibility from day 1, and this is the fastest way to learn. I spent my first week on site working directly with the client, which was a brilliant experience. My office was very welcoming, although small.

Whenever I was working at BDO I felt valued by my colleagues, and an asset rather than a burden, which gave me plenty of confidence to tackle difficult tasks. The training week in Birmingham meant that we were fairly well-prepared to work independently on projects, and getting tasks done led to further trust from managers.

My buddy was brilliant in the first week, helping me work through the sections one by one. Managers were hit-and-miss, as some provided excellent guidance and others let you get on with it and assumed everything would be fine. This is something that could be worked on in future, but it's understandable since management are often very busy juggling projects and time.

Fairly busy. It depended on the project, but I would mainly be given tasks that would fill a few hours, and once done it was very easy to communicate with others and start new ones. A few times, I was left with not much to do when stuck on a task that I could not complete myself. But mainly this was fine, it depends heavily on the client.

Quite a lot of responsibility, which was great. It was down to me to call and cast, complete sections of the audit on my own, and communicate directly with the client too. BDO clearly place lots of trust in their interns. Responsibility is the fastest way to learn, and in that respect the company got it right, although I don't know if this applied to all of the interns or not.

It will assist me inevitably in later life, as I learnt the basics of accounting and audit without any prior experience. It won't help me much with the rest of my degree, as I study something entirely unrelated. However, some of the transferrable skills will definitely be valuable in both the remainder of my studies and working life too.