Matthew Steelman

Hometown: Downingtown, PA
Class Year: 2020
Major: Accounting and Finance

Summer 2019 Internship: Summer Intern, PricewaterhouseCoopers Assurance Practice

“This summer I had the opportunity to work with PricewaterhouseCoopers Assurance Practice in their Philadelphia office. My audit work focused on asset management clients, where I spent the majority of my summer working with a private commercial real estate client. I helped the audit team gather evidence and prepare worksheets to provide a quality, independent audit of the client’s financial statements. I found great value in the work I was doing because I was able to combine my skills of both accounting and finance to perform the audit work. Looking at the client from a risk basis, the assets we were most concerned with during the audit were the physical warehouses and other property owned, as the client fair valued each and every property. As the client valued all of their own properties, we, as the audit team, had to get comfortable with the property values. In order to do this and mitigate the audit risk, the team and I had to do our own fair value assessment of the properties. To perform this task, we looked at the rent rolls, occupancy, geographic location, and industry trends to allow us to project out cash flows. These cash flows were then used in a discounted cash flow model to ultimately find the value in which we felt comfortable. By comparing our results from our model to the values of the properties the client had on their books, we were able to assess the client’s financials and mitigate the audit risk.”

Value derived from internship experience:

“This summer showed me the value of having a strong team relationship. In order to ensure deadlines were met across the team, open and constant communication was key.

Additionally, I saw the value of networking via cross-team communication. There were times my team was able to leverage worksheets created from other teams to help expedite our processes, saving us significant time on certain aspects of the audit.”

Matthew’s career goals:

“After graduation, I have accepted a full-time position with PwC in their Assurance Practice. I plan to attain my CPA certification and continue in public accounting where I would like to specialize in asset management clients.”