Attest Services Intern
Grant Thornton is a mid-sized public accounting firm. The company has offices throughout the world, and my internship took place in the Philadelphia office. I worked in the Advisory service line, specifically Business Risk Services in the Attest Risk department.
In my role, I worked with the IT Auditing team to assess the state of our clients IT systems. I worked mainly on testing access configuration and security administration, as well as many other controls. I also helped to create SOC reports and other official documentation.
One of the highlights of my internship was the Key Client Competition. This was a nation wide competition among all Grant Thornton interns. There was a local competition for the Philadelphia office, and the winner moved on to a Regional competition, and potentially Nationals after that. All of the interns were broken down into teams of 4 and assigned a client account. Our task was to work with the current account team to develop an idea about how to grow our business with the client. This was a great way to learn more about how companies like GT earn revenue, and also exciting to create a plan for a real business opportunity which will be pursued by the firm in the future. I am proud to say that my team won both the Philadelphia competition and our Atlantic Coast regional competition, placing us in the Top 6 in the nation.
I learned many new skills in this internship that relate to the MIS major. I feel much more confident in my knowledge of many Enterprise IT Systems, since the clients we were testing used a variety of software. I am also more comfortable with the regulatory environment in IT, since we did work with SOX reporting.