Summer intern - Assurance Review

Overall an enjoyable placement. Got to see a variety of areas of audit such as: public sector, corporate, law firms and pension schemes.

Very much. All of my colleaueges were very polite throught my time at PwC. I would be landed with some laborious or dull jobs, however, colleagues would always be apologetic and always offered to help with it or do it if I didn't want to.

There was as much support and guidance as I required. PwC has a great coaching atmosphere and I felt ocmfortable to ask almost anyone in the office questions. Even if there wasn't anyone available face-to-face, I could ask via email for guidance and colleagues were still happy to assist.

I never felt overworked or too busy. Sometimes I didn't have much work to do on the clients I was booked to but I could just ask around colleagues to see if anyone had anything I could help with, which was a great opportunity to work with new people.

There was a lot of responsibility but never so much that it was daunting. I was given the power to manage my own time almost completely whilst working on a client and had the responsibility for doing testing and preparing files to be reviewed. If the responsibility felt like too much, I was more than happy to speak to my manager and explain the situation which resulted in changes that meant I felt comfortable with my responsibility.

The communication skills developed by speaking with clients and colleagues are priceless. They'll be a great help during studies when I need to speak to other students or academics for help. The technical skills I've learned what help much in studies but they'll be a great headstart if I choose to do an accounting job as a graduate.

The office was always a comfortable place to be. Very nice new office with great facilities. Sometimes the office was quiet due to people being busy or out of the office, but people in the office were always friendly and happy to have a quick chat. I didn't mind the quietness because it helped me concentrate on work.

Very well organised. The residential training and office training were brilliantly organised and made them very enjoyable. The organisation of work was great too, at the start of the internship I could see all of the clients I was booked to work on for the whole internship. This allowed me to plan travel arrangements and prepare for those clients before-hand, which was very useful when clients were quite far away from the office.

The training during the first week of the internship was great. 3 days were spent at a residential training course at a hotel, where we completed training on the technical side of accounting, providing us some fundamental knowledge we'd need on the internship. The following 2 days of training were at the office. With one day learning about general aspects such as contacts in the office, meeting people and learning how to set objectives. The second day of training in the office was spent solely on IT training. This training was very useful as all the way through the internship it is required that you can use your laptop reasonably well in order to get the work done. In my first week after training I set objectives with my people manager, who I met with several times over the internship. The objectives meant that i had clear targets of what I wanted to achieve from the internship which gave me some solid direction, rather than just turning up and getting the work done.

Very appealing. From speaking to many relatively new starters (within 3/4 years of joining) the overall impression was very good and they seemed happy to work for PwC. Don't know as of yet whether I have a graduate place but it seems commonplace to offer interns jobs after completing their internship.

There was only one other student on placement whilst I was there and didn't get much chance to socialise as they were away on different clients. Socialising with colleagues was fairly good, I was invitied to the office annual dinner, a couple of sports events and drinks after finishing work a few times.

I lived at home during the internship. Socialising is very reasonably priced in sheffield city centre.

A few, I played football for the office against another PwC office and I was invited to their sports day.