Justen Altaras – Concur

Hey! My name is Justen Altaras and I am a junior in Foster studying finance and entrepreneurship.  This past summer, I interned at Concur Technologies for the SEC Reporting and Compliance team within the Global Finance department.  Even though I am a finance major, I wanted to work in an accounting department because of the accounting skills that I learned during sophomore year.  In addition, I believe that everyone should learn the basics of accounting because it is extremely important for every business.  Initially, I heard about Concur through my roommate who had worked there the previous summer.  I went to the career fair at UW and found the Concur table.  It was awesome to see all of the recruiters wearing their royal blue Concur shirts.  I signed into their database using my LinkedIn profile and received a confirmation email explaining how to apply for certain departments.  To prepare for the interview, I created a list of questions that I wanted to ask about the whole company as well as the specific internship position.  The recruiting and interview process was by no means easy, but felt relaxed.

As an intern, I worked in three areas.  The first area was preparation of the financial statements for filing.  I did many tie-outs of the 10-q and earnings release for Q2 and Q3 of FY14.  My team needed as many eyes on the documents as possible to ensure that they were mistake free.  The second area was testing and organizing Concur’s internal controls for the SOX act.  And the last area was research for individuals on my team.  The combination of these topics consisted of mostly what I worked on during the summer.  As a side project, I made a dashboard consisting of the economic performance of Concur’s investments.  In all, I was able to get my feet wet in many different projects.

For the future, I am really interested in clean-tech solutions for businesses and sustainable business practices.  I want to work in the waste management business or alternative energy.  As for the upcoming summer, I would love to intern at Concur again.  The culture of the company is unparalleled and the internship program truly allows the interns to grow.  However, I want to try a different department, primarily a finance internship.  I recommend anybody seeking a summer internship to take Concur into consideration!