Off the Ledger
Your days as a college student are almost numbered. The working world is calling. As you get ready to embark on your career, you have to be thinking, “What am I going to do when I graduate?” “Is a job in public accounting right for me?”
Where do you want to go?
You have so many options. Big firm or small? How do you decide? Where can you go to get the real, honest look at a career in public accounting? What is it REALLY like to be an intern? What will my life be like as a staff accountant?
See your future...
At Porter Keadle Moore, LLP (PKM) we’re here to help. We’ve created this blog site just for you! To help you find answers to these and other questions about working in a public accounting firm. Real interns and brand new staff accountants chronicle their experiences with our firm. Read what they have to say. Ask questions, share your opinions and we’ll respond.
Things I Wish I Knew
Cayci Moon - Audit Intern
I am the queen of doing silly things, especially when I get nervous. Here are a few of my blunders I had during my internship with PKM. These are to help so you do not have to ask the “silly” questions or sit and wonder what these crazy abbreviations are! I have spent the last two months here at PKM doing an audit internship and I am excited to go back to school and incorporate all my newly learned “audit jargon” into my daily vocabulary!
Things I wish I knew before I started
- You do not have to ask to go to the bathroom (and believe it or not you can go anytime you want!)
- P/f/w - pass further work
- P/d/w- per discussion with
- I/c/w - in connection with
- Bus - is an abbreviation for business not a BUS (i.e. more than likely a bank will not have an “entertainment bus”).
- Know the order of balance sheets and income statements.
- Nonstandard Journal entry testing is not a gift.
- Traffic is not the end of the world.
- “It” happens.
- If you act like you know what you are talking about, 9 times out of 10 the client will have no clue you are clueless, and visual samples of what you want are always helpful.
- It is far better to be over dressed than to show up underdressed.
- You will get fat during busy season.
- Get everything you need from the client before you leave fieldwork, they tend to be a little slower through email than when you are in their office.
- GOOGLE everything, it will help to keep you from asking a “silly” question.
- When you go to talk to a client always take a pen and paper, I got the deer in the headlights look and sweating panic attack when a CFO starting spatting off a monologue about this account detail, knowing there was no way I was going to be able to remember it all!
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