Internship

For this past 16 weeks, I have had the opportunity to work for KPMG, LLP in the Internal Audit division. Throughout my time working for the firm, I gained invaluable experience that I know will help me further in my career. There were several challenges and obstacles that I faced throughout the duration of my work at the firm, but it all ultimately helped foster my knowledge of auditing and other accounting roles that are open to accounting majors after graduation. Furthermore, my work experience provided me with the valuable opportunity of developing as a business professional, which I found to be one of the most valuable aspects of all, even though it didn’t directly relate to my accounting studies.

Throughout the entire duration of my internship, I was primarily in charge of testing a clients’ internal controls to ensure that the internal control was functioning properly and that the company was in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). KPMG refers to this formally as “SOX testing”. On any given engagement, my senior/supervisor would assign me controls that related to a particular business process. Depending on the client I was working on, these processes would vary across multiple firms. My experience allowed me to truly learn the fundamental business processes that allow for everyday companies to function properly and operate in compliance with regulation. For the majority of my internship, I was working on an upstream oil and gas client involved in the exploration and production of finding areas to drill for oil.

On my very first week of the job, I was immediately able to apply some of my accounting knowledge that I acquired throughout my undergraduate and graduate accounting courses. Working as an internal auditor, the class that immediately stuck out to me as being beneficial for my position was my auditing course. There were a substantial amount of concepts that I learned in my auditing course that directly applied to my job function...