Big 4 associate AMA

natninja

Per title

What's your salary?

Assuming you're in either tax/audit and not CF or consulting, are you happy with your choice of service line or do you regret not going with the other?

Reply 3

Sharif92

What degree did you study? Are you looking to stay in audit after completing your ACA?

Reply 4

natninja

Original post by UWS

What's your salary?

In line with the other big 4.

Original post by zachyg

Assuming you're in either tax/audit and not CF or consulting, are you happy with your choice of service line or do you regret not going with the other?

I'm in audit but my group also does a lot of advisory work too. I'm pretty happy with it though there is a lot of work sometimes. I'm quite lucky as I'm training as a Financial Instruments specialist which is quite interesting.

Original post by Sharif92

What degree did you study? Are you looking to stay in audit after completing your ACA?

I studied physics, I did the MPhys course at Oxford and graduated with a 2.2. I'm undecided at present, if I do well I'll stick around, otherwise I'll probably try to make a move to Equity Research.

Reply 5

Nomerdoodle

Original post by natninja

Cool, thanks for the reply! FI specialist sounds interesting. I'm a final year A&F degree student at the moment. We actually did IAS 39 only last week! I presume you're getting involved with investigating some pretty complex derivatives as an FI specialist?

Reply 6

Bankergotcash

Why not investment banking instead

Reply 7

natninja

Original post by zachyg

IAS 39 is becoming obsolete soon but still useful for now, it's more how to recognise and derecognise financial instruments and hedging relationships than valuation which is covered in IFRS 13: Fair value. Don't have enough experience to be doing much of that yet but have worked on assessment of hedge accounting and some simpler non-vanilla FIs such as dual currency bonds. What it does mean is that there's less point putting me on larger audits so I get a lot more exposure to clients than some of the rest of my intake - with one client I was given an empty audit file and client contact and told "go". I'm also working on some interesting targeting and bid work alongside my chargeable time which means I get a lot of partner interaction.

Original post by Bankergotcash

Why not investment banking instead

After spending a year putting in 70 hours in the lab and a part time job on weekends working that many hours wasn't too appealing, also the ACA and the more technical work that I do was quite appealing. I'm in a banking sector team and bankers are really not very good at what they do on the whole.., they're very good at selling though.

Reply 8

username853993

Original post by natninja

Per title

I know this is an old thread but how are you finding it now? Are you enjoying it? is it challenging? what made you go for a career in finance?

Reply 9

natninja

Original post by madmadmax321

I know this is an old thread but how are you finding it now? Are you enjoying it? is it challenging? what made you go for a career in finance?

I've recently been promoted to Senior Associate which has seen an increase in expectations and workload but yes I am still enjoying it. Being relatively low on the totem pole there is a lot of time doing fairly mundane admin work such as sending out confirmation letters, updating trackers, arranging meetings etc. (though you get that in whatever career you choose at an entry level and if you can demonstrate competence you'll get to do interesting challenging stuff more and earlier - on the plus side a lot of the tedious stuff is now outsourced as they realised it's a waste of fee earner time) but there is also more interesting work too and a lot of interaction with clients (on small clients this will range from AP clerks to C-level whereas on larger clients most of your interaction would be with the FC and their assistants). So yes it can be challenging and interesting, there are other days where I wonder why I'm doing it at all haha.

In terms of why, the ACA my friend, the ACA (well that's for B4 accounting specifically). For finance I have a genuine interest in it.