PwC Risk Assurance Internship
PwC is a multinational professional services firm. This past summer, I had the opportunity to join its Risk Assurance practice in McLean, Virginia. PwC’s Risk Assurance practice helps its clients mitigate and manage risks by reviewing potential risk areas such as IT technology, finance, data analytics, regulatory requirements, data security and privacy, internal audit, and the third parties clients rely on. Within Risk Assurance, I was placed within the Process Assurance practice. This practice focuses primarily on financial and operation applications/business process controls reviews, database security controls reviews, and IT general controls reviews. To put it simply, our job was to ensure that the systems financial statements rely upon were operating correctly based on pre-specified controls or business rules.
I gained a huge amount of knowledge from this internship with PwC that includes, but is not limited to, my day-to-day tasks. Through observation and opportunities to represent my own ideas, I learned about professional communication and its best practices. PwC’s internship also allowed for shadow experiences to gain perspective on roles beyond what you may be assigned to. I had the great opportunity to shadow a partner within PwC’s cyber security practice which not only provided me perspective on that practice, but also the responsibilities of more seasoned employees. In relation to my work, I was able to familiarize myself with my client’s business in order to put my review of their system controls into context. I worked primarily with SAS code review and documenting data migration which further honed my technical skills.