After going on an internship hunt for a moderate sized firm I found out about Tate and Tryon through a neighbor. After hearing about T and T, I looked at their website and saw their allocation of resources was to mostly nonprofit organizations. Looking to start out my first experiences in the actual accounting and audit world, it seemed like Tate and Tryon would be a great place from me. I sent in my resume and was lucky enough to get an interview and land the job. Before the job even began, Kate, the HR director, invited me to a Nationals game with some of the staff of the firm. It was a great way to meet the staff and become familiar with who I was working with. I live close to D.C. and unfortunately root for the Nationals, so going into the game I knew a win was highly unlikely. The first day I was more excited than nervous as T and T seems to have a very friendly atmosphere. All the interns met up to do our initial paper work with Kate, and after that we immediately started some real work training. Stephanie was the first staff member to give us training with audit planning. I was surprised that she got us right into training, especially since I have friends that are working for bigger firms and heard that they have a week of background and orientation before they start and training or do any hand on work. Stephanie assigned us all real clients to do audit planning for before the field team got into the audit. I was a little worried because this would actually be used in the audit of the company, but I was also very glad because this seems to be some of the best real experience I could get. After we dove into the audit side, we next looked at the tax side with Leslie. She showed us that before you ,fill out the 990 forms (which is the primary return for non profits) you want to group the accounts so that the tax software will fill out parts of the form automatically. Grouping the taxes at first seemed daunting, but once I figured out what I was doing I was very efficient at it, and was learning about the tax world at the same time. The next day we had an example shown to us on how to fill out the actual return. The IRS decided to change around a lot of the 990, so showing us an example was more plausible. The tax part was pretty straight forward and, as some of the staff put it, it was just like figuring out a big puzzle. To summarize my thoughts of the first week, I think it’s a big advantage to be coming in with only three other interns as opposed to 70. I got to meet everyone in the audit department including Charlie Tate and Mike Tryon. Everyone knows you are one of the new interns and takes time to learn your name. The training is more personal and you get to ask direct questions of staff members. Also, you become familiar with all the interns, so in case you miss something they can quickly fill you in. This created a great experience for my first week and hopefully it will continue.
-Tim Tishman Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
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