During my summer vacations, I decided to do an internship at a Finance and Accounting firm to understand the functionality of such a firm and explore my interest in this career further. I applied for an internship from the school itself. I did an 18 day internship at KDL and company, which is a finance and chartered accountancy firm. During my tenure, I learnt a lot about the basics of accounting and financial management, and also understood the work environment prevailing in this industry. The LOs covered in this CAS experience include: LO2, LO4, and LO7.
LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
This was my first experience as an intern, thus I faced a lot of challenges. The main problem was the prolonged duration of my internship making it very difficult for me to work on other stuff. The internship was from 11 am to 5 pm, and it took about 45 minutes for me to travel from my home to where my internship is. Thus, I left home at 10:15 and returned home at 5:45, making me extremely tired and exhausted. Thus, I could not do any other work such as studying for my upcoming SAT exams or playing with my friends. However, after a week of internship I started to effectively manage my time by doing all my work early in the morning. This crucially helped me develop my time-management skills, which will be very important to me in the future.
LO4: Show perseverance and commitment in CAS experience
As my internship was very long and exhausting, I had lots of thoughts quitting internship as it was getting very hectic for me. Along with this, I was also asked to Audit financial accounts for the first three days. I was given humongous files of about 1000 bills in each file to audit everyday. It was very tedious and monotonous to go through financial accounts and bank figures everyday, as it made me drowsy in an hour itself. I was on the verge of quitting internship, as it had crossed my bar and tolerance range, thus I went to have a talk with the owner of the company. However, he convinced me to stay in the firm and from the next day onwards, he kept giving me new forms of work such as overdraft entry, sales entry, purchase entry, which eliminated the boredom and gave rise to my curiosity to know more and more about it.
LO7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
While working at KDL and company, I was also sometimes given very confidential data about some of the clients which was not meant to be shared with everyone. I made sure that I maintained my integrity and did not discuss that data with anyone, or else it may create huge losses for that firm I was working with. Along with this, I was also asked to make a presentation by the employer for all other employees about the basics of Chartered Accountancy. While making the presentation, I made sure that I do cite every source of information I go through and do not risk committing plagiarism, which would make my work highly unethical.
Summing it all up, the internship was very fruitful for me as it enlightened me about chartered accountancy completely, taking me one step towards the career I dream about. I learnt about the time, hard work, skills and potential it takes to become a CA, and the rewards it gives to an individual after attaining a degree.
