Company: PwC
Date: 2012-01-05
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Worked hard, but great experience.
Pros: As the first job out of school, this job is great.  It really teaches professionalism, instills a hard work ethic, and even though you feel underpaid, the firm pays you more than your friends.  When you start the job, there is a bunch of people who are the same age as you so it's easy to make work friends.  The best part about this job is the people (not necessarily management, moreso your start class).

Earning vacation is easy to do, and also easy to max out on.  The firm usually gives two or three extra holidays a year so that you can take the week between Christmas and new years off (there is usually a firm shutdown).
Cons: You work long hours and the hours are very inconsistent.  It's hard to plan dinner dates with friends or significant others because your schedule gets very unpredictable at times.  Expect your friends and/or significant other to not understand your schedule and possibly distance themselves because of this.

There is very little gratitude when working in public accounting.  While management tries their best to compensate their staff for hard work, they really only give bonuses to those who work long hours.  That being said, there is no compensation for efficient workers, and, in turn, management really only ends up compensating those who are probably inefficient.

Scheduling needs a lot of work.  People get scheduled by a project's annual hours and not by the timing of those hours, so you could end up getting scheduled on projects that cause your schedule to have three projects overlap at once.  When you bring it up to deployment, deployment is slow in responding.