Company: Deloitte
Date: 2009-11-19
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Disappointing Summer Intern Experience
Pros: - Some of the people that work there are really smart.  Most of the interns I met were pretty bright.
- If you're an intern, you can usually swing by with 40-hour weeks.  I'm pretty sure they try to limit intern hours or something to that extent.
Cons: 6 weeks of my 9-week internship were unassigned - that is, I literally sat "on the beach," as they call it there, trying to contact managers and find work.  The "work" that I was given during those six weeks was literally busy work - like creating a presentation for a "hypothetical" client.  I appreciate the managers trying to keep me busy, but it's completely unacceptable for Deloitte to leave its interns with nothing to do for the majority of the internship.  The explanation I got from HR and managers was that there was work in other locations (e.g. Michigan economy sucks), but Deloitte's clients didn't want to pay to fly out interns to their project in the rough economic climate.

I eventually secured a role in a team on a client doing something only loosely-related to what I originally signed up for, but by that point in my internship I had no desire to work at Deloitte and pretty much put in the mandatory 40-hour weeks and peaced out.

The HR people tried to spin the experience in a positive way - saying that I can claim that I "interned in one of the harshest economic climates."  Give me a break - all my friends interning at other firms (think E&Y, PwC, etc...) were plenty busy for the full duration of their internship.  Most were even traveling to client sites.

Some of the people I met there were really smart, but many others were... let's just say I would prefer not to work with them.  Many of the 2nd and 3rd year people I met there seemed burnt out and in a zombie-like state.  A lot of the people seemed really stressed out and unenthusiastic about the work.

The other interns I worked with were also unassigned for long periods of time, so I certainly wasn't a unique case.  It's clear that Deloitte is really struggling right now.  For those choosing between accounting firms, I would recommend going to another big-4 firm.