a. Information about the organization
Risk Advisory Intern
Grant Thornton Advisors LLC is one of the largest professional services and advisory firms in the U.S., providing audit, tax, and advisory services to clients across a wide range of industries. I worked within the firm’s IT Risk / SOX Compliance practice, a specialized group within the broader Risk Advisory service line that helps clients test and strengthen the internal controls supporting their financial reporting. My work was based out of the firm’s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania office, and involved collaborating with both onshore teams and offshore (India-based) engagement teams on a regular basis.
b. Job function
As a Risk Advisory Intern, I supported two parallel workstreams throughout the internship. The first was hands-on IT General Controls and IT Application Controls testing for SOX compliance engagements, where I helped assess whether client-side controls around system access and change management were properly designed and operating effectively. The second was proposal and request-for-proposal response development for prospective advisory clients in the insurance, healthcare, and financial services industries, where I helped the practice pursue new business by drafting and shaping client-facing proposal content. Across both workstreams, I worked directly with engagement seniors, managers, directors, and partners, balancing live client testing deadlines against internal business-development deadlines.
c. Examples of projects
On the testing side, I executed Test of Design and Test of Operating Effectiveness procedures for Identity and Access Management and Change Management controls across two client accounts (a manufacturing/industrial company and an energy-sector company), validating client-provided evidence against testing attributes and using AI-enabled platforms (CompliAI, built on Fieldguide, and Microsoft Copilot) to accelerate documentation with independent review. On the proposal side, I served as a primary drafter on a multi-week request-for-proposal response for a prospective healthcare-payer client, authoring the executive summary, firm qualifications, and methodology sections. I worked closely with my mentor, a Partner at the firm (Sean), along with another Partner and two Directors, iterating through multiple drafts and incorporating their feedback. Much of my drafting work was ultimately reflected in the final proposal sent to the client. I also built a data-mapping template to migrate a client’s control environment into Grant Thornton’s AI-enabled testing platform.
d. What I learned and how it relates to my major
This internship gave me direct, applied exposure to concepts from my Finance and Management Information Systems coursework at Temple University. Working with AI-enabled control-testing platforms and enterprise systems like ServiceNow and SAP S/4HANA built directly on what I learned in Cloud Architecture, giving me practical context for how cloud-based platforms (including AWS-hosted environments) support enterprise data storage, access controls, and system governance in a real business setting. On the finance side, my coursework in Intermediate Corporate Finance and Honors Financial Management helped me understand why the internal controls I was testing actually mattered — connecting the technical testing work back to how a business creates value, manages risk, and protects the integrity of its financial reporting. Beyond the technical content, I built practical skills in translating detailed audit work into clear, persuasive client-facing communication, managing multiple concurrent deadlines independently, and understanding how the day-to-day work I was doing connected to the bigger picture of how a business creates value and makes money.