Nearing Another "Last"

This Friday will be the final day of my internship. As indicated by the lack of posts in the last...period of time...I have been kept busy and productive during the job experience. Today, actually, is exactly three months since I started. The time has passed quickly, especially since the majority of the other intern class left in mid-March, one month ago tomorrow. With their departure, I received any and all assignments flowing down the pipeline as the lone intern in the office. As such, I was able to take on sundry projects that I may not have seen at all, or only seen limited parts if there were other interns with which to divvy up the work.
Thursday, of course, is April 15, "Tax Day," and it has been to this end that I have crunched numbers, prepared templates, completed forms, performed research, and handled deliveries for the last 90-odd days. Due to the variegated nature of my time, I have learned through experience more than all the time I spent in classrooms, studying books and taking notes. Now, some of those notes and a few of those books were helpful to a degree during this time--most notably the writing of research memos in Dr. Schnee's Accounting 471 - Federal Taxation course--but there were indubitably ideas or instruction I had to subconsciously unlearn to better understand the practical application of the knowledge I had in the environment I found myself in.
When I selected accounting as my major, I did not see myself as a tax accountant somewhere down the line, although as I progressed through the class schedule and the semesters, I found more and more that into tax or audit were the directions the Culverhouse School of Accountancy at the University of Alabama usually launched its graduates into, often accepting them back for yet another year to earn a masters in tax or accountancy (audit) before returning them as second graduates to the workforce, where they began their careers as well-educated associates at any number of public accounting firms. What I enjoyed about my two early accounting classes was the order and organization, the practical nature of the practice which allowed the effective directing of a company's financial course. Cost accounting, or managerial accounting, was my favorite course, but for most other students in the accounting program, that was their least favorite class. Agreed, learning 15 different methods of budgeting, nearly every one specific to a certain type of application, was challenging, and it would take a thorough review for me to distinguish and explain each one from another. Nevertheless, it made sense, and it seemed to be a constructive, beneficial application of the knowledge I was receiving.
Despite my leaning toward cost/managerial accounting, internships were not nearly so abundant or advertised in the field, and while I got some experience in the area as a student accounting/business intern at the University Press for nearly two years, a full-time internship in the profession eluded me. As such, I tentatively joined the flow of the rest of the accounting students, plodding through tax, audit, and governmental accounting en route to an internship in public accounting. It was not until very late in the recruiting process that I made up my mind one way or the other between the two major fields (tax or audit), and I eventually decided upon tax, because I liked the class and the process I learned from Dr. Schnee better than the audit class. Not the best way to decide, but without actual experience in either field, it was the best option for me since 1) tax professionals usually do not have to travel out of the office, and 2) the process of tax was more in line with the way I thought and approached things.

[to be continued]