WHEN Keunyoung Oh started university, she planned to become a lawyer. That’s why she decided to study law, after all. In August, however, she will join Ernst & Young (E&Y) – as a trainee accountant.

“Like most people who enrolled in law I thought about going into practice,” she says. “A huge majority of my class are doing that and have training contracts for next year. I did not have an idea about what being a lawyer would involve when I applied, but I thought that it would open up a lot of opportunities.”

But last year she entered – and won – Profitunity, an annual competition run by E&Y that pits teams of entrepreneurial students against one another to see which group can raise the most money for the Prince’s Trust, a charity that supports young people. As a result of the work she did for the event – and the people she met through it – she’s decided that her career lies in business.

Oh and her team chose to enter the competition because they wanted to impress prospective employers, but at the time she didn’t count the big professional services firm among them. “We all thought that it would [greatly] enhance our CVs. It is also a really good way to gain contacts at E&Y, but none of us started out seeing it as a starting point for a career in accounting.”

Her team’s business idea was a fashion show that ended up attracting 550 visitors and raising £13,000 for charity. Oh and her teammates did everything themselves, from organising models and advertising to persuading designers to lend or donate their clothing, but got plenty of advice from the business mentor that E&Y assigned to them as part of the competition.

“He was in constant contact with us through e-mail. He gave us great ideas and kept looking over our business plan . . . he kept us level-headed so that we thought big, but not too big.” The more Oh talked to her mentor, the more interested she became in the sort of work that he did. When the time came to take up a summer internship, she went to E&Y rather than a law firm.

“When I first applied there I did not think about it as a major career change,” she says. “I had met quite a few people there [through Profitunity] and saw it as an opportunity to explore a different side of corporate life.”

Law students can be quite one-track-minded, she says; they get their degree, complete their professional qualifications and start a training contract. Profitunity helped her to see that there is all sorts of creative fun to be had in other aspects of business and gave her an insider’s view of what a nonlaw life would be like.

“When you are a student looking forward to leaving university and a job, but not knowing what a job will really be like, having some contact with a company is really valuable,” she says. “It breaks down a lot of boundaries.” www.ey.com/uk/profitunity

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