Internships give students a way to experience a potential career. As accounting major Amber Beenken demonstrates, taking the initiative to find a challenging internship is crucial to developing the necessary skills employers want from their employees.
Between her sophomore and junior years, Amber looked for an internship near her hometown of Titonka. She chose an internship with Prestage-Stoecker Farms, a pork production company, at company headquarters in Algona, IA. Before she started, the company had just bought another company, so she was put to work figuring out the accounting requirements to support the company’s feed system. This responsibility provided Amber a unique way of practicing her accounting skills.
“I had the chance to work through problems as they arose,” she said. “After I was done, I had something to show for the time I spent as an intern.”
Amber’s hands-on experience in accounting for an agricultural company was a unique experience that few accounting majors have had the opportunity to try.
Charting her academic and professional plans began when she was a freshman. Amber began exploring her future career by attending the career fairs offered by the University and UNI Accounting Club meetings. By her junior year, Amber had become the treasurer for the UNI Accounting Club; during the 2005 school year, she handled the club’s funds, membership dues and fundraising.
Her experience in the UNI Accounting Club continued to broaden her leadership and organizational skills and provided her a way to utilize her accounting knowledge. Amber found that while UNI accounting students are highly recruited, most with jobs in hand well before graduation, it still pays to start meeting with recruiters and company representatives early in one’s academic career.
“The more connections you make early on, the more recruiters can get to know you,” she said.
Her high-level of responsibility at Prestage-Stoecker Farms and her UNI education helped earn Amber an internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Minneapolis in summer 2005. There, she worked as an independent auditor performing control testing and reviews with both large and small companies.
Amber plans to sit for her CPA Exam in May, and she will graduate with Honors with Distinction in spring 2006. Armed with her internship experiences, Amber has already secured a position at PricewaterhouseCoopers to begin working after graduation.
Updated 25-Oct-07
