Just Graduated

My name is Sanne Kuppens, I am 23 years old and I just graduated from my Master Accounting at Tilburg University. A month ago I started my working life as a staff auditor at EY Eindhoven.

When I graduated from high school in June 2010, I did not have the slightest idea of what I would be doing for a living after Uni. Working life just seemed too far away and I first concentrated on the kind of subjects and opportunities the different study programs had on offer. International Business Administration at Tilburg University turned out to be the most attractive one to me. I got the chance to discover four different fields of business and find out what I like the most; finance and accounting. Furthermore, I realized that I want to work in an international setting. For a start, I headed to Melbourne, Australia, to experience international student life at the University of Melbourne.

When I came back, I had to make a choice: finance or accounting? Well, I decided to do both. Finance first, accounting afterwards. So far I have never regretted it. If you ask me, they perfectly complement each other. While doing my Master in Accounting, I got in touch with several of the Big 4 firms. In order to find out whether I wanted to start my career in finance or accounting and to get to know these firms better, I went on a business course with two of them, EY and PwC. If you are in doubt just like me and you ever get the opportunity to join a business course, please do! Since then, it has all been clear to me; auditing it would be! After struggling to choose between EY and PwC, I started my thesis internship at EY in February of this year, which already gave me a taste of working life.

EY is a great company with great people. I was very happy to be able to come back after summer holidays and start my career with them. Now, four weeks later, I have experienced so much already! In my first week, training sessions with starters from other offices in the Netherlands were scheduled in Arnhem. Those sessions were a kind of wrap-up of what we had learned during our study years, but also a preparation for the more in-depth trainings the week after, which were held in Antalya, Turkey. In Turkey we got totally prepared for our start in the business. What an amazing experience! Work hard, play hard let’s say.

Then there was Monday 14 September, the start of my job. I was very excited, a little bit nervous even, but I felt comfortable right away when I met my new colleagues. Everyone has just been so helpful over the last four weeks. I feel like I have become part of a family. In the past two weeks my colleagues already took me to client interviews, entrusted me with my own tasks and let me take charge in handling them. Honestly, I had never thought I would be able to do these things at this stage. It was really the combination of being thrown in the deep on the one hand and receiving collegial support on the other that made me do them. It goes without saying that I will need to learn a lot in order to become a ‘registered accountant’ (RA in Dutch). I believe there is some truth in the often-heard saying that you ‘know nothing when you get out of school’. Practice is really not theory, I already figured out.

I have not set out real career plans yet – I hardly know the possibilities – except for one; I hope I will be able to develop myself into a worthy accountant.