Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, South Africa, downtown Manhattan - the whole world will be Karen Burns's oyster when she becomes a chartered accountant in April 2004!
She's a trainee accountant in PriceWaterhouseCoopers working as an assistant in its tax and legal services department on Dublin's Georges Quay. But don't forget, she says: the company has offices all over the world and the chartered accountant's qualification is recognised all over the world. This girl will travel.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers has a presence in more than 150 countries, with more than 800 offices worldwide employing 150,000 people.
At the moment, Burns is at the start of an eight-week study block in preparation for her Professional Exam 3. It's a testing time. The four exams over four days begin at the end of June, the culmination of a hard year of study and work.
During the year she attended lectures one or often two nights a week and all day Saturday. The subjects were taxation, auditing, financial accounting and management accounting. Along with about 300 other young graduates, she is committed to working by day and studying late into the night to pass the accountancy examinations.
And she's happy that there's been plenty of opportunity to apply what she learned at night to her daily work. Burns is at her desk at 9 a.m. and leaves in the evening at 5.30 p.m. The day can involve preparing tax computations for various companies for sending to the Revenue Commissioners. On the consultancy side, she researches the tax implications of different scenarios, such as company mergers. Mergers may affect a company's tax structure, she explains. Her job is to check all the legislation and the taxation agreements that apply in different cases.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers helps clients solve business problems by providing assurance and risk solutions, in order to "measurably enhance their ablity to build value and improve performance in an Internet-enabled world", as the company's corporate profile explains.
Maths was always Dubliner Karen Burns's favourite subject at the Holy Child Primary School in Larkhill, Margaret Aylward Community College in Whitehall and later in Maryfield College, Drumcondra, where she studied for her Leaving Cert. Maths and accountancy were always her two top subjects, she says. Yes, she says, she's quite organised, logical, focused and practical in her thinking. A love of problem-solving is another strength that she brings to her job.
After the Leaving Cert in 1996, she went to Dublin City University to study financial and actuarial mathematics but "there was a lot of theory" and after a year she switched to the three-year BA course in accounting and finance, which was more geared towards problem-solving.
There were about 120 in the class and she the course interesting.
One great advantage of doing it was that it ensured that she was exempted from sitting Professional Exam 1 and 2.
There was no problem getting a job after graduation. She had won a scholarship based on her first-year results in the degree course from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and so, in the milk round in 1999, when large companies scouted for the best and most suited among final-year university students, she was interviewed and began work at the end of September last year after graduating earlier in the summer.
Talking about her job, she says: "It is important to have a liking for the business environment. You don't have to be great at maths but you must be practical." It is also important to be able to communicate with people, she says. "It's exciting in that the work is really varied from dealing with figures to looking up legislation. It's not routine."
