How would people rank these two firms for internships?

interested, anyone has any opinions?

PwC will look better on your CV and you'll get a regulated experience, albeit doing unchallenging work.CVA is more of a gamble - it will add less value to your CV but your experience could be much better with more interesting work, if you are assigned to a good project and manager. However, you could as easily end up joining in a low period or working with a poor project manager, who'll have you making tea all summer.

vda, just wondering what u meant by not doing any challenging work at PwC. They do a lot of Private equity stuff, and according to some MBB consultants I met, working on PE projects will give you the most rigorous training compared with any other kind of projects.

Regardless of views on the type/quality of PwC's work, the internship programme is centrally determined and is relatively standardised.The internship will look good on your CV, but the work you get will be not much different from the work that an audit or a tax or a corp finance intern does, and will not be on the project's "critical path".Smaller firms such as CVA have less reserve bench strength so are more likely to have to use interns on client projects. The absence of a centrally controlled programme means a project manager who has appropriate work and is short-handed will make good use of interns. However, the absence of programme control means you're just as likely to get a project manager who doesn't want to p*ss his/her client off by diluting the standard of staff on the project.

people i know who've done the PwC strat internship were not at all put in with the other interns (audit etc), but were put to work on Strat work (which as the poster says is largely PE). Strat is pretty separate from the rest of PwC