While Accountancy student Lee Tze Yiing was on exchange in France, he decided that he wanted to challenge himself and source for a local internship on his own, to gain the experience of working in another country. Armed with his knowledge in data analytics and machine learning (he was certainly very skilled as you will find out soon!), he successfully secured an internship with Deloitte France. Here is his story.
I recently completed a 6-month internship in France at Deloitte, and I can confidently say that it was one of the most fulfilling, challenging and important experiences for me in many ways.
Finding the Internship
I began the internship search almost 8 months before my eventual start date in June 2018. In fact, I was actually on exchange in Paris, France, when I started the search, so that was where I first began the internship hunt.
Finding an internship as a foreigner was, honestly, not easy. I used multiple digital methods to get my resume out to employers, such as unsolicited emails, The doorways to the Deloitte France Financial Advisory office on the 33rd floor
The Internship
On my contract, it said Stagaire Data Analyste, which translates to Data Analyst Intern. I accepted the offer by Deloitte France Forensic & Disputes, a department within Deloitte France Financial Advisory.
Within the department, it is split between general investigators and tech-specialist investigators. The tech-related investigators are then further split into eDiscovery and Analytics. eDiscovery handles forensic data searching for clients, while the Analytics team deals with all forms of data services, from due diligence to Know Your Customer (KYC) services.
Due Diligence Machine Learning Model
When it comes to journal entry investigations, the traditional workflow was to extract the general ledger, and use Excel to manually slice and filter the data according to certain criterion that were “red flags”. These “red flags” are usually built up from scratch in collaboration between the clients and the investigators, but there are usually some common red flags that pop up across each of these journal entry investigation projects.
As you can imagine, attempting to use Excel to slice and dice the data into manageable chunks to select suspicious entries is an extremely difficult thing to do. Many of these requirements change according to context (such as the country of incorporation of the clients), time (such as corporate restructuring), and scope of focus (for example, some clients are only interested in a particular keyword). This meant that there was very little workflow re-use between projects, with many of these projects being started from scratch each time.
One of the projects I was assigned was to improve the efficiency of this task. I created Foosball during breaks with colleagues, referred to as “baby-foot” in French. There were other distractions as well, like a Nintendo switch for Mario Kart and some arcade games.
Everything in French?
One question I got a lot when I reached back home in Singapore was: Was all my work in French?
Not really. There was definitely a large proportion of administrative things that were in French, such as communicating with HR, department meetings, and sometimes team meetings. One of my proudest achievements was to hold a complete conversation with a Deloitte IT support staff completely in French while talking about a A free popup jazz concert during lunch in summertime at La Défense – the French equivalent of Raffles Place
As a Whole…
This internship was sort of like a journey of personal and professional growth, with much greater technical challenges as compared to my previous internship. It was both fulfilling and rewarding in so many ways, and I do think that anyone considering an overseas internship should definitely try it out for themselves, no matter how hard it is to get your foot through the door.
Nothing will happen unless you take the first leap.
© 2018-2019 Lee Tze Yiing. All rights reserved.
The above blog story is an extract of Tze Ying’s full blog post on his internship experience in France. Read his full post at This article was originally published on The SMU Blog.
