Even though many of our graduates will have progressed in their careers since completing a case study, they are still of interest to students who wish to gain an understanding of the world of work.

- Worked as 3.5 years in Banking audit as both a trainee and assistant manager which meant running teams to analyse both small and very large (eg. Barclays PLC) banks' financial statements, financial controls and systems to understand if they were presenting accurate information in financial statements to shareholders.
- Also did a qualification whilst doing this - ACA to become a chartered accountant
- Following this, I have undertaken an internal secondment to restructuring which focuses on turnaround, transformation and liquidity. I work mainly in transformation which involves working with companies which are not in distress through large scale changes. To do this I do a lot of data handling, stakeholder engagement, advising on decisions and team management

- Client meetings and calls to get or validate data
- Organising team day to day work activities
- Writing board papers
- Working with financial models to produce different data outputs and making these readable for clients
- Working on side projects on areas of my interest - diversity, public sector strategy, education

- Variation - I do something very different every day and there are always new challenges
- Working with interesting people who are interested in their work and challenge me too
- Learning something new every day

- Email traffic!
- Sometimes hours can be long and inflexible meaning social life has to take a back seat at different times
- Being client facing most of the time means being selective about how we use language or tackle challenging situations which can be frustrating

- Getting a good post-grad qualification whilst working
- Big organisation so a chance to meet a lot of people and work with lots of different companies
- Opportunities to travel - I've travelled extensively around the country, with a few international trips too

- Engagement with people
- Ability to digest information very quickly and pick out important bits (which I definitely developed as part of a heavy reading-arts degree)
- Professional qualification
- Resilience and positivity in busy times

- Did a placement year 2012/13 as part of my degree @ KPMG
- Returned to university 2013/14 to complete degree
- September 2014 - returned to KPMG, Banking Audit as a second year Graduate Trainee
- October 2016 - Promoted to Assistant Manager in Banking Audit following successful completion of ACA
- April 2017 - Secondment to Restructuring as Principal Consultant

- Plan to make secondment permanent in restructuring with ambition to be promoted to Manager by April 2018
- Incorporate international secondment into work in the next 5 years
- Medium term - lead department at KPMG
- Medium term - undertake further qualifications (potentially MBA)
- Longer term - move into a part time role in professional services whilst pursuing other interests in social change and set up own charity/become a politician

You don't have to go into something related to your degree if that's not the path you want - your skills are very transferable and employers will be flexible. Don't feel though that if you do end up doing something very different to your degree that you can't pursue the things that interested you at university as part of your job - I keep up with politics by making gender diversity something I do as part of my job as well

No matter what it is, whether that be volunteering, working, travelling, doing something after university is always valuable - even if it's not what you want to do long term doing something is always better than nothing