Putting in the Hours

Long before she started her internship at Deloitte, Abbey Toland visited the firm’s office space high above Federal Street in downtown Boston. At the time there were no walls or windows: only subflooring and a wicked breeze blowing through what was a massive construction site for the new Winthrop Place office and condo complex in downtown Boston.

Toland got that sneak preview of the Deloitte office because her father works in construction, and as a high school student she would sometimes visit his job sites to bring him lunch. This fall, she’s starting a full-time job at the Big Four Firm—in the very same office space.

“It’s so funny being in there and seeing it all built out and everything,” she says. “I keep saying to myself, ‘I was standing here when this building was studs.’”

Like her father and her mother, who’s a nurse, Toland has never been afraid of hard work. She stocked shelves in a specialty grocery store near her hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts, when she was 14. She’s waited tables. And as a full-time student at Suffolk, she worked 30-40 hours a week at the Dubliner, an Irish pub down the street from campus. Over St. Patrick’s Day, she managed to log almost 60 hours in a single week.

“Some of my best friends are from that job,” Toland says. “I joke with people that I did a study-abroad-at-home, because now all of my friends are Irish.”

From the Dubliner to Deloitte

Toland’s professors recognized that she was a hard worker and encouraged her to apply for the winter internship program, what Suffolk calls a “winternship.” Its goal is to place Sawyer Business School accounting students in Big Four and other accounting firms during the winter when internships are more readily available. The program has been so successful that of the more than 65 students who have completed winternships, almost all have been hired by the firms where they interned—including Toland.

While the winternship was a bit intimidating at first, Toland says she quickly realized that a lot of what Deloitte was asking her to do was familiar from her accounting classes.

“The audit class I took was perfect for preparing me,” she says. “My professor did such a good job explaining what an audit is and then what that looks like in a day-to-day work situation.”

Along with her knowledge of accounting, Toland also brings to Deloitte client-facing skills from her hospitality-industry jobs. “I feel like dealing with people in a restaurant setting gives you a lot more confidence to be able to talk to anybody,” she says. That poise is one reason she was given a “best and brightest” award in 2023 by the accounting faculty.

Toland will spend the summer studying for her CPA exam and working at the Dubliner before starting at Deloitte in September. And as someone who loves Boston, she’s thrilled to be working in the city’s downtown financial district—in the space that her father helped build.