Meet Bhudhav, a Cybersecurity Intern at Accenture

Length of your internship and when you began: 3 months starting June 2026

College course: Computer Science

What drew you to this company when you were seeking an internship?

I wanted the mix of technology and consulting. I had done technical work before, but I had never seen how a technical decision gets justified to the person paying for it. Consulting puts you in that room. Accenture was the clearest place to get both at once. You stay close to the engineering, and you also sit in front of the client while the call is being made. Security was where I most wanted to do that, because the technical answer and the business answer are not always the same.

What expectations did you have before you began your internship?

I expected to be on the sidelines. Shadowing, note-taking, tidying up documentation. I assumed there would be an intern project at the end that was mainly a learning exercise, valuable for me but not something the team would be relying on. I also expected the structure to be rigid. I thought my week would be decided for me. It has been the opposite. I have been hands on from early, working directly with my Managing Director rather than watching from a distance. My client project is the clearest example of how wrong my first assumption was. It is going to be presented to the Resources team, which is around a hundred people. That is not what I thought an intern project would be. Nothing about this summer has felt like the quiet intern project I was bracing for, which is great.

Can you describe a typical day in your role? How does it compare to the expectations you spoke about in the previous question?

No two days look the same. Most of them are split between my security work and the additional projects I have picked up along the way. I said yes to anything going, and it has led me to learn so much about the practice and about different areas of the company. A recent example is mornings spent preparing briefings on frontier AI models and their cybersecurity implications for a managing director, then afternoons building the scavenger hunt app along with an analyst.

The clearest example was the AI Summer Series. Myself and two other interns entered and built an interactive target operating model tool for fraud alert triage. We were up against teams of analysts, and we presented to senior managers. We won it! Compared to what I expected, the difference is ownership. I thought I would be watching other people do the work. Instead, I have been given pieces of it with my name on them, and I have not been handed a filler task yet.

Has this internship made you feel as though you’re on the right career path, or are you going be pursuing a different field afterwards? 

This internship has given me real exposure to security, which has turned it from an assumption into something I can judge. It has also given me a taste of what a fast-paced environment looks like day to day, and I have liked it more than I expected.

What has changed is my criteria rather than my answer. I want to work in a fast-paced environment with technology that is at the cutting edge. I know I want to be building the thing and not only advising on it. The next role I look for is the one that tests that again.

How has your internship made you feel more prepared for working life?

I have had to design a system that has to work in a building, on colleagues' phones, on a fixed date. That is a much higher bar than a project that only has to survive a demo.

The bigger shift is presenting to people far more senior than me. Winning the AI Summer Series as a team of three interns meant pitching to senior managers against analysts, on a hard deadline. The briefing work did something similar. It made me learn a subject well enough to be questioned on it, not just well enough to describe it.

What are the things about this company that you would recommend to others looking for an internship, such as culture, benefits, workload, etc?

Access, first. If you have something worth saying, senior people here will give you their time. I had a managing director set me a follow-up task after a conversation about frontier AI models. Ideas also get taken on their merit. The intern scavenger hunt was an intern's idea, and it is now a real event with a date and a budget behind it.

The workload is real and there are weeks with deadlines that do not move. But nothing I have been given has been busy work, and the intern group is close enough that you are never doing it alone.

The social side is a real part of it too. This summer alone there has been pitch golf, a summer party, a beach clean, a charity quiz and a scavenger hunt, plus info seminars that come with free breakfast. I also ran the Docklands 5k and set a personal best. I only signed up for it because I got chatting to a teammate at the company tag rugby game. That is the part I did not expect. You end up doing things you would never expect.