ABOUT THE JOB

ABOUT THE JOB

Employer

KPMG is one of the "Big Four" accounting firms located all over the world. I worked out of the Washington DC office, located on 2001 M Street NW. I worked 40 hour weeks, Monday thru Friday usually 8:30 - 5. I was working for the Risk and Advisory Services (RAS) branch of KPMG, which mainly works on systems auditing and advisory work. The RAS branch has grown significantly in the past few years and as mentioned the firm has locations worldwide, making it very hard for me to say the number of people working in the branch. As far as interns go, RAS had the least number of interns at seven, out of about sixty in the Washington DC office. This is simply because KPMG is an accounting firm, and has recently began seeing the need for RAS in its business plan.

The CS or CIS people work on system auditing or advisory work. The type of work you do within the branch is usually a personal decision. Within system auditing, you make sure that certain security regulations are being implemented and followed and make sure that proper controls are in place to ensure access, application, and change controls. Advisory consists of (but not limited to) giving advice on system architecture design and penetration vulnerability. More times then not, the "customer" is the client that you are conducting an audit or advisory work for. It is important to be able to talk to the client and to get along with one another because you need to obtain information from the client to do your work. I had a few supervisors, depending on the work I was doing. My supervisors were: Don Farineu (Senior Manager), Charles McKinney (Manager), and Erik Boxhoorn (Senior Associate).

My Job

During my internship, I got the opportunity to work on different projects. My first assignment was to help design a database in Microsoft Access that would help track system information for the Social Security Administration (SSA). The SSA contract had not been won when I got put on the assignment, however, I was asked to begin designing the database so the database could possibly be used right away. I also got the opportunity to work on a SAS-70 audit for Health and Human Services (HHS). On the audit, I helped document access controls, segregation of duties, system software, and system continuity. My last assignment was to help an associate design a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) tool. My supervisor did not have any high expectations of technical skills that I should have. Rather he was fairly impressed with the technical skills that I did have and the experience I had obtained through course work done here at JMU. I also believe that is why I was asked to help out on so many database assignments, due to my CS and technical background. For the most part, all my assignments went well, however, there was one time where a problem occurred and delayed the completion of the assignment.

For the CMMI tool, I was asked to help out after the tool was already in production. Once I got to talk to the other associates and see some of the work, I knew that the project was "doomed." The main reason that the project was going to be unsuccessful was due to the fact that the associates just began "cranking" away at the task without any design or planning. I recall asking to see the requirements document and there wasn't one in place. Another problem was that, the manager who set out the requirements would always come back and change some of the requirements during production, but never pushed the deadline back. It took quite a few discussions or meetings for me to explain the importance of planning for us to come to the realization that the project simply had to be scrapped and re-started. Even though my internship ended when the decision to start the project over, I was happy to know that my co-workers realized the importance of designing and planning. Through constructive meetings and discussions, this was accomplished.

I got the opportunity to attend two trainings during my internship. The first was a week long training for all the interns, and it was held in Philadelphia, PA. I was excited about the opportunity to travel and meet new people and most importantly do it all for free. The training in Philadelphia was not as interesting as I had hoped because it was heavily based on accounting and not much was discussed about the RAS branch. Nevertheless, I had a blast because of my co-workers. The people at KPMG are friendly, easy to get along with, and most importantly fun! There were a lot of students from JMU, which was surprising to me because there were many people that I did not ever see before. It was great making friends with people that I would be able to hang out with back at school. I also never really felt as if I was at work, no matter how stressful a task may have been, you were around people that were enjoyable, which made working fun! The second training was held in Washington, and was strictly for the RAS branch and was about audit. This was also a great time, because of the people. A lot of the information that was being taught was related to the work I was doing for HHS, so I was well informed on terms and able to participate.