Tamara Czetto – Senior Consultant in Risk Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Frankfurt, Germany
I graduated from the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development in 2015, and I am now working as a Consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), an auditing and consulting company.
I work within the Risk Consulting department, which deals with governance, risk and compliance issues in the private sector. One of our main aims is to help clients prevent corruption, fraud, bribery and non-compliance with regulations, design respective communication campaigns and train people.
I am currently helping to design policies and training in order to help a company which faced a corruption scandal. In order to do this, we design and complete interviews with the employees to assess the situation, review current policies and training content and revise them in line with the needs of the client.
In another project, we advised a company on respecting international labour standards – for example, assuring health and safety at work, equal pay and preventing child labour. Within my own company, I was also able to start an initiative to support female leadership at work.
Throughout my time at University I aspired to working at a development bank or an international organisation however, I found that finding a permanent junior position right after graduating was very difficult. Many jobs were short contracts or unpaid internships and I felt that very few of these positions actually provided major improvements in developing countries, but rather bureaucratic, hierarchical and inert environments. It is this that made me decide to work on the business side, directly with companies operating in developing and emerging economies. I believe that the experience from my current job will prove very useful if I ever decided to join an international institution.
Studying at Reading helped me to find my job and excel at it by allowing me to broaden my horizons. We deal with companies that operate internationally, including developing and emerging economies, and I am grateful that my time at Reading taught me to better understand cultural differences and case-by-case approaches which are key for successful and sustainable projects.
I chose Reading as I was looking for an interdisciplinary degree surrounding developing countries, combining both economics and other social sciences. I especially wanted a hands on education not focussed on textbook models based on unrealistic assumptions about the world, but rather a degree that looked at real world cases. Reading offered all of these things, and had a great variety of courses, amazing experienced teachers and has a very good reputation in my area of study.
Being in an environment where professors were always happy to listen and help, and treated us as an equal was very motivating and helped me to raise and develop my own ideas, instead of just following common opinions. I also really enjoyed that we got a lot of reading material to study certain aspects further, but at the same time we were free to choose how and what to study.
My time at Reading was definitely the best time during my entire academic life. I made very close friends and I could study something I was very passionate about. I'm very grateful for that opportunity.