Accounting Internship Reflection: Tax Prep & Small Business
This paper is a reflective internship report written by an accounting student who completed a four-month placement at a small tax preparation firm in 2010. The report documents hands-on work with corporate tax returns, bookkeeping, payroll, and multiple business structures including corporations, LLCs, and sole proprietorships. It also reflects on professional development, including lessons in organization, client service, and the continuous nature of accounting education. The student concludes that the experience confirmed a desire to pursue private practice and underscored the importance of staying current with evolving standards such as GAAP and IFRS.
- Introduction to the Internship: Context, goals, and internship statement explained
- What I Did: Chronological log of tax and bookkeeping tasks
- What I Learned: Reflections on skills, organization, and career direction
- Conclusion: Summary of functional and personal growth from internship
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What makes this paper effective
- The student sets clear learning objectives at the outset and systematically evaluates whether those objectives were met, giving the reflection a coherent arc from expectation to outcome.
- Concrete details — specific tax forms (Form 1120, Schedules E, L, M-1), named business structures, and real task sequences — ground the reflection in verifiable professional experience rather than vague generalization.
- The paper balances functional reporting (what tasks were performed) with genuine personal reflection (what the tasks revealed about career preferences and skill gaps), demonstrating metacognitive depth.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses a structured internship statement as an evaluative framework, returning to those original objectives in the reflection section to assess growth. This before-and-after technique is characteristic of strong experiential learning reports: it prevents the reflection from becoming a simple narrative and instead positions experience as evidence for or against stated hypotheses about the student's career path and skill development.
Structure breakdown
The report is divided into four sections. The introduction establishes context and motivation, including the verbatim internship statement. The second section ("What I Did") provides a chronological log of tasks. The third and longest section ("What I Learned") shifts to thematic reflection covering client service, organization, technical knowledge, and career direction. The conclusion synthesizes both functional and personal takeaways and closes with a forward-looking statement about lifelong professional learning.
Introduction to the Internship
As part of my accounting education, I undertook an internship at a local tax service from August to November 2010. The firm is a small business providing tax preparation services from two offices, one in Angleton and one in Houston. The business is small and handles mostly small commercial tax work, in addition to some personal tax work. I had very little idea ahead of time what I would actually be doing, but I was excited to gain some hands-on, real-world experience in accounting, as I expect to enter that field one day. Seeing what it is really like in practice was important to me.
My internship statement, formulated at the outset of the program, was intended to serve as a guide for the types of work I would be doing on the job. The statement was as follows:
"As an intern, my objectives are the following: reconciling accounts, preparing federal and state tax returns, audits, bookkeeping, payroll, and setting up corporations. I chose to intern at a sole practitioner's office because of the knowledge and experience gained from handling different tasks. This particular office deals with a high volume of clientele and handles a wide variety of services."
The choice to work in a small office was deliberate. I knew that in a small office I would be exposed to a greater variety of tasks. I thought this exposure was essential, as it would help me narrow down my area of specialization. There are many practical questions I expected to answer as a result of working in such an environment. The first and most obvious was whether working in a small office was something I would want for myself. The idea of working for myself is appealing, but it comes with additional challenges — doing marketing, for example. I wanted this internship to give me a better sense of what a sole practitioner's professional life is really like.
The other thing I wanted to learn was which areas of specialization I might prefer, if any. I thought that in a large firm I might only perform one type of task, whereas at a smaller firm I would get to do many different things. In doing so, perhaps I would find a preference for some tasks over others — or perhaps not. I felt that only by gaining real-world exposure would I know.
My report on the internship is organized into two sections. The first outlines the work I did at the tax service, aided by a log I kept throughout. The second outlines my reflections on the internship, specifically what I learned over the course of the autumn while it took place.
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