4Students. Road to Success.

How Marko's journey took him from immigrating to Germany to a rewarding internship at PwC, what plans he has to further his career, and how PwC Plus fits into the picture.

• Dots aligned – My Road to PwC Germany
• Reconciling Reality – My Internship at PwC Germany
• At Future’s Crossroads – My Road after the Internship
• How PwC Plus fits into the picture?

By Marko Indic

University: Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences Campus Künzelsau
Degree: Business administration, marketing (& media management)
Internship: October 2025 – March 2026
Department: Assurance Solutions Industrial Services
Office: Stuttgart

Dots aligned – My Road to PwC Germany

Nothing in life is guaranteed, not even life itself. To exist is to live in constant uncertainty of the future. I often jokingly say that the classic job interview question “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” is more difficult for me to answer, than to give you a thorough explanation of how IFRS 15/ASC 606 revenue recognition works.

My life’s path has consistently demonstrated that resting on my laurels is near to impossible. I come from a long lineage of people who dared to step into the void of the unknown with little regard for fear and doubts. My parents and I immigrated from Serbia to Germany in 2015. Following this monumental decision, the course of my academic and work career became utterly unpredictable. Despite numerous insidious consultations to the contrary, I switched from a Gemeinschaftsschule to a Gymnasium to pursue higher education. There, I founded a pupil company that I restructured due to changing “market” needs (we went from advertising other pupil companies to selling reading syllabus novels to generate more revenue in order to keep the company afloat) and later on, again accompanied with immensely insidious advice to not do so, I founded my schools very successful and still active (since 2022) news portal Oberstufenraumcentral. 

Following my Abitur I moved to Künzelsau to pursue my university degree. Here another leap of faith was made by becoming the Student Council Representative for my Campus. In a matter of weeks, I proactively met with various interest groups, spanning from the City Council to Prof. Dr. h. c. mult. Reinhold Würth. Perhaps you can sense a pattern here which will not be out of place for understanding the leap to Big 4.

Once the time came to secure an internship a veil of despair started to be constructed in the minds of many students. Not one day passed without someone somewhere mentioning that it is nearly impossible to find an internship. It is important for you to understand, that the environment of Künzelsau leaves one to believe that a path in technical industry (be it the screw emperor himself or the many other industrial enterprises of the Hohenlohe region or any car brand) is the most plausible one. However, it is important to remember that I can be stubborn as a mule in carving my own career path.

Coupled with predictably insidious comments about this career choice, I landed an internship at PwC. I have had an affinity for numbers and data since early childhood. Many offbrand Legos participated in numerous large logistically supported battles with territorial maps and economies. I even tracked my “equity” (daily allowance) development over the months. Therefore, as I once told one of our clients during dinner “auditing found me more than I searched for it”.

During his guest appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA once talked about identifying so called Early Success Factors in order to see what future investment opportunity would be most profitable. In retrospect it is difficult to identify a single point in time that made me decide to enter audit. Be it roleplaying bureaucracy on trees with friends or creating my own personal asset balance sheet, early indicators were definitely there, however coupled with my immediate surroundings sheer unfamiliarity with this field of work, only myself could have guided me into this direction.

Finally, I would like to leave you with a quote: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." – Steven Paul Jobs during his 2005 Stanford commencement address. Ultimately, I ended up at PwC because of multiple yearlong trends in personal development that enabled me to gravitate and thrive in a corporate environment such as this one. 

Reconciling Reality – My Internship at PwC Germany

Some particularly heavy lifting has been done over the course of the internship. Under my belt I have racked 8 stock count observations, 3 different clients and a plethora of ancillary ventures, one of which has been coming in contact with the talented team of Dr. Elsholz. I have gone at great lengths to proactively maximize my utilization in all these ventures.

Furthermore, I personally initiated numerous meetings with partners and managers to discuss topics such as the Big 4 market dynamics, competitor analysis, AI frontiers and use cases, ongoing geo-political developments and internal organizational mechanisms. It is not rare for me to go into a 30-minute meeting and exit the room after 2,5 hours.

At the beginning of the internship PwC supported us New Joiners through the onboarding program, of which I am a great fan and happy customer. During that first week we grappled with accounting concepts such as auditing cash, liabilities, revenues, stock observations, software tools and much more. I called this period “PwC University” as I really did produce numerous notes akin to that of full-time university students. Mind you, this was done of my own volition.

Following this my first client engagement began. This was the first time traveling for work in this fashion and engaging with the client on site. I am an information sponge and have noted and documented all key learnings that my senior team members taught me. I am very grateful that HR dispatched me to 3 different teams, because I got to see every stage of an audit.

On my second engagement I was present during the preliminary process recordings/interviews. There I transformed into what I can best describe as a “stenographic maniac”. Similarly to court stenographers, I managed to type out almost every word said during these interviews, resulting in the production of around 11.000 words. To put this into perspective Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is in this wordcount ballpark.

This collection of very precise and accurate data proved to be incredibly useful, as the cognitive ability to remember complex company structures and operations begins to progressively fade as more time passes by.

Another byproduct of being exposed to this amount of at times somewhat dauting tasks has been the development of my personal Excel based workflow dashboard I call “Universally Reliable Reporting”. This is a simple system that has enabled me to keep track of multiple concurrently running tasks, thus making me an effective and accurate information provider in any team I get dropped in (regardless of department).

My buddy Iza (a buddy is a [senior] associate who accompanies you during the internship) asked me during my mid-internship feedback round if the internship is as I imagined it to be before signing up. She was met with an astounding “Yes! Even better than I first thought!”.

As someone who has seen a variety of industries spanning from defense to veterinary medicine, I am very contempt with my internship choice. You truly get to the nittygritty of business. As Warren Buffet once said, “Accounting is the language of business” and it’s damn good to become a corporate polyglot.

At Future’s Crossroads – My Road after the Internship

At the time of writing, upper management is deliberating on defining the utilization demand for the coming months. In one meeting where I discussed my future utilization possibilities with a partner, I visualized the coming period in a very picturesque manner: A profile shot of the Golden Gate Bridge with the two towers labeled “Busy season n” and “Busy season n+1”. The space between I call the “Sommer drought”. Therefore, my future at the company is currently uncertain.

What’s certain is that I am now in the 6th semester of my bachelor’s degree and by the looks of things will be finishing next semester. I am “exam debt free” as in: I have finished all exams on time. This in turn leaves me with valuable time that can be utilized in a career advancing way. Currently I like to harken back to the PwC mantra “Grow here, go further” as this might just be the way I orient myself for the future.

I have made it clear that I would like to further hone my skills as an HR asset at this company, particularly in the usage of vbs (Microsoft’s Visual Basic Scripting. Basically, making Excel do grunt work) as its implementation boosts team workflow efficiency and could generate more goodwill with clients by solving their optimization deficits. I recently came across a Business Insider article about how “PwC engineers built an AI agent to tackle the corporate world’s least sexy task: spreadsheets”. By now every layman and his grandmother knows, that this is a powerful technology. Its revenue-boosting effects are clearly illustrated by the example of various PwC customers. To summarize, my plan for the future is to further deepen my own “moat” as an HR asset by any means necessary.

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How PwC Plus fits into the picture?

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