Katy, Internships: Transcript

How did you find the recruitment process?

Recruitment process for the internship might have changed since I've done it - when I did it it was quite scary to be honest because it was the real interview that the graduates did so when I was at my interview there were graduate people there. So you send off your form, then I had to do an on-line numerical test and then when that came back I got invited to an assessment day so we went to the Newcastle office and had an interview with the manager and I had to do two psychometric tests - it was a maths one and a spacial awareness one so those are a bit daunting, but everyone's always really nice and they try and look after you and it sort of does put you at easy a bit and my interview wasn't as much of a grilling as I thought it would be; the manager that I had was really nice - he just sort of went though my application form and tried to dig a little bit deeper and it felt more like he was trying to get to know me rather than test me.

What did you do during your internship?

Well during my eight weeks the first week we went to Latimer, which is PwC's own conference centre. There I got to meet loads of other interns and we all and a week of learning what PwC's all about, their different processes and things like that. After that week we went back to our own regional offices and I spent the next 7 weeks joining different audit teams at client sites - just getting to see what they were doing and getting to know what an audit is and how it's performed and generally meeting different clients.

How did PwC prepare for your internship?

Well the main thing they did was the very first week of the 8 weeks, we went to Latimer in London where they have got there own conference, hotel, complex and we spent a whole week there on site and there was about a hundred, a hundred and 30 other interns there from all over the country and you got greeted by the top of PwC, all the heads and you are welcomed into the firm which was quite nice you know to see all the senior people taking an interest. And you basically spent the week getting to know people that were in the same position all you and you learned the basics of the job so you didn't go back totally mystified and you learnt how to use their computer systems so you had a good basic knowledge for when you went back to the offices to do your work.

How did you 'buddy and coach' help you when you were an intern?

As an intern I guess it's more useful when you are actually working there cos it's something that you are supposed to have in your career with PwC and when I was there as an intern my buddy- cos I was only there for 8 weeks showed me the ropes and it was quite nice to shadow him for a week - see how things are done, made me feel a bit more at ease with what I was doing and I met up with my coach …twice - once at the beginning and once at the end to see things were going and if I was doing the jobs that I wanted to have the experience on and things like that.

What did you enjoy least about your internship?

Well I guess there are going to be times when you are going to get some boring work to do, and if you are not willing to see the bigger picture and ask questions -because you are quite a junior member of the team and you've got to start somewhere and you don't have enough knowledge to do maybe the more complex things, so you are sort of doing the "ticking and the bashing". But you have to keep in mind and think why am I doing this and ask questions and try and understand what's going on, then you turn that bad thing into an experience to gain knowledge, and you sort of know what's going on.

What have been the long term benefits of your internship?

The most immediate benefit was the fact that I got a job offer out of it, so while all my friends were running around doing job interviews I could concentrate on Uni and didn't have any other worries. Now that I've joined the firm, I've realised that PwC has so many opportunities available within the firm itself - you are never going to be bored. And even if you want to leave and join industry, you're going to have PwC on your CV that's going to outshine everything else and get you anywhere you want to be.