From Rupert:
Every year PwC flies out all of their Start Interns from around the country to a set location for orientation and training. During the training the interns learn more about their internship and the firm. This year I was fortunate enough to be one of those interns flown out to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta, GA. I am a part of the 13th class of Start Interns at PwC. The Start National Training was three days of learning and networking. It was designed to create an environment in which interns would feel comfortable stepping out of their comfort zones and hopefully grow as people and professionals. It was also designed to give interns more insight on what to expect in the coming weeks during the internship.
During PWC’s national training I listened to and met many intelligent and talented individuals from across the nation. I also got to hear from many professionals who were once in my shoes as Start Interns. Throughout the training several professionals gave me advice on how to approach my internship and on how to succeed at the firm should I choose to pursue a career there. The training was mainly broken into several general sessions where all 650 interns would gather in an auditorium where we were given an overview of what we would be doing in our “breakout” sessions. In the breakout sessions all the interns dispersed into much smaller groups where we learned more about what was discussed in the general sessions. The general sessions and breakout sessions were all very interactive and engaging. I learned a lot about what it means to be a PwC professional and how to uphold the standards expected from every employee in the firm. The PwC Start National Training was an extremely memorable event. I was able to travel to a place where I had never been and form bonds with several like minded individuals all while growing as a person and a professional.
From Alexandria:
Two weeks ago I got the amazing opportunity to go to PwC’s Start National Training in Atlanta, Georgia. I met so many other interns, associates, and partners from all over the country. The first day we had Kickstart Training where we just got our PwC laptops set up. Also, an assurance partner talked to us about her experience as a partner and her journey getting to that position. Later that day, Start National Training started which lasted until Thursday afternoon.
We learned things from the different lines of service PwC offers to developing our personal brand. Other concepts we discussed were expanding our network, understanding the firm and communicating effectively. In our leisure time we went to the Atlanta Aquarium and had some great dinner and dancing.
My favorite aspect of the Start National Training was that they made it very entertaining and were really focused on the concept of diversifying relationships and PwC as a whole. My favorite concept PwC takes on is called Be Well, Work Well. This is kind of like their motto and they had rooms and activities all dedicated to Be Well, Work Well. This included silent discos, a lot of food, music, and improving our personal brand.
Overall, Start National Training was very fun and I met many people that I will definitely connect with in the future.
From Solomon:
After a couple of interviews and a few midterms during my last semester at Diablo Valley College, I got an internship offer from PricewaterhouseCoopers thanks to help of The Street Smarts Scholar program. I would also like to give a special thanks to Jing Li and Rich Johnson who helped me and my siblings prep for the interviews with the firm. This blog post is about my experience at the Start program national training that took place in Atlanta.
Monday June 10th, 2019 was a travel day. Luckily, my siblings Rupert and Alex had the same flight and were sitting close to me on the plane. We had an hour and a half layover in Denver which split our travel into two hour plane rides. When traveling with multiple people, leaving on time can be next to impossible, especially when they are your family. After about six hours of travel we finally made it to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport. Since PwC was sponsoring our trip, we met up with a representative who then assigned us to a chauffeur who took us to the hotel. This hotel was huge and had many other business trainings at the same time as ours. The next three days of training was not really what I expected training to be. Each day of training was not like the last. We went over a lot of material, the average length of a day at training was about 12 hours. The days consisted of numerous activities, most of which we did in the general session and a breakout room.
The training as a whole almost felt like school; we did detective work, identifying outliers in a list, and Excel training. The Excel training was the easiest because it only consisted of doing vlookups and making pivot tables which most people learn to do in a statistics class. I think the main point of the training and flying out to Atlanta was to show the Start interns what PwC does for its employees to entice us to making a career at PwC or in public accounting. The overlying theme of each day was teaching us what PwC stood for. As a Start intern there is not a lot expected of us but what the keynote speaker Reggie Butler told us was to go beyond what is expected. PwC has this value called “your tomorrow”, this statement can be broken down into many meanings. The central idea of this statement is to prepare people for tomorrow.
I translated this as that today we have so much information available to us literally in our pockets. So if you want to learn something new, do not wait, go out and search Google for information on the subject you want to learn. If one desires to change their way of life or even the world, they can start towards that with the touch of a button. I really enjoyed the training and hope to use the knowledge I have gained and put it to good use during my internship.
