[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I am currently going through on campus recruiting for the MAcc program I am in with very little luck. I have a 3.7 GPA and a undergrad GPA of 3.2. My question is if I take a job at a small firm, not a sole practitioner, but not a large firm by any means, will that kill my chances of getting into a larger firm? Could I stay a year and try to move on?

The small firm does mostly tax work, wich I don’t want to do, but my options are very limited. Will I be able to get an audit job if I only have tax experience?

Thanks for your input

[lastsection4mee]

I just moved from a small to a large firm so I wanted to give you my input. Started at a smaller firm (15 people) due to mistakes I made with the recruiting process. Spent about a year there doing taxes and some audit mixed in as well as various accounting services. It is good to get experience in debit and credit accounting. A lot of larger firms appreciate that experience, so it is definitely a plus working at a smaller firm.

My suggestion is to make sure the firm you go to has some audit, if that is something you want to focus on in the future. Can you go from a small firm only doing taxes to audit at a large firm, ehhh it's unclear. Yes people have done it but they are in the minority. Your best bet it to get some experience at a small firm and then when you are ready to leave, go to a midsized firm. Then after another two or three years make another jump to a larger firm.

The key is, when you are interviewing always focus your resume and the discussion on audit and less on the tax. In your spare time read about audit, study it, be educated on how auditing works. Due to being at a small firm it handicaps you and the learning process. So the more you learn out of the office the better prepared you will be when you move to a larger firm.

So in short, yes you can move from a small firm to a larger one. You may need to make a couple jumps before you get to that larger firm but if you keep your eye on the what you want you will get there. Hell I did it so you can too.

[Author]

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