From Rejected Dreams to Deals: My Journey Inside PwC’s Most Competitive Department

There’s a sentence I heard more than once during those years: “The transfer is impossible.”

The first time someone said it to me, I was a fresh-faced intern in the tax corridors of A.F. Ferguson & Co., quietly nursing a different ambition. The second time, I was older, more experienced, and apparently still just as stubborn. And both times, I chose not to believe it.

This is a story about wanting something specific in a profession that rewards compliance. About a father’s advice I almost ignored. About a department that kept rejecting me until it didn’t. And about the strange, slightly embarrassing truth that sometimes the long way around is the only way through.

The Weight of a Classroom Announcement

I remember exactly where I was sitting — F8 class — when the news landed. The Big Four firms were cutting back on hiring ACCA students. A few fewer slots, quieter recruitment cycles. Our sir tried to soften it. The industry is still open to you, he said. You’ll be fine.

He wasn’t wrong. But he also didn’t quite understand what that news meant emotionally to a room full of students who had been told, implicitly and explicitly, that Big Four was the rite of passage. Not just a good job. The job. The validation that you’d actually made it in this profession.

For ACCA and ICAP students in Pakistan, getting into one of the Big Four — KPMG, Deloitte, EY, or PwC — wasn’t just career strategy. It was proof. Proof to your family, your peers, and honestly to yourself, that all the studying, the exam failures, the re-sits, the sacrifices had amounted to something real. Not going was treated almost like a quiet defeat, even when it wasn’t.

I knew that. I also knew I had a more specific goal than simply “Big Four.” I wanted Deals.

An Internship, a Job Offer, and a Decision That Confused Everyone

When I got the internship at A.F. Ferguson & Co. — a PwC member firm — I was genuinely thrilled. And I was placed in Tax.

Tax is a solid department. Respected, technical, in demand. My Senior Manager, Shaheryar, was excellent. By the middle of the internship, he pulled me aside and offered me a permanent role. It was a real offer, from a real person who’d watched my work, in one of the most reputable firms in the country.

I said no. Politely, but clearly: I want Deals.

Looking back, I understand why that puzzled people. You’re an intern. You’ve been here five minutes. You’re turning down a confirmed job to chase a department you haven’t even worked in. My colleagues — people I liked and respected — were matter-of-fact about it: transfers to Deals don’t happen. The department was selective, insular, and not in the habit of accepting lateral moves from Tax.

My father, thankfully, was the pragmatist I needed. Accept the offer, he said. Get inside the firm. You can push for Deals from within.

So I did.

Audit First. Then Deals. Then Audit Again. (Yes, Again.)

What followed was not a straight line. Nothing about this story is a straight line.

I worked in Tax. Then, after a year, I was moved to Audit. I spent 1.5 years there before, finally — after enough conversations, enough waiting, enough quiet persistence — I got my transfer to Deals.

One year in Deals as an Associate II. And then I resigned.

The plan was bigger: a Master’s degree in Sweden. I had been preparing for GMAT, grinding through IELTS, building the application. I was ready to close this chapter and start an entirely different one overseas.

It didn’t happen. The Sweden plan fell apart — not dramatically, not because of any single thing, but in the way these things sometimes do. Quietly, and then all at once. I ended up taking a job in industry instead.

The salary was four times what I’d been earning at the firm. Four times. I want to be honest about that, because I think people expect me to say the money didn’t matter. It did matter. It was real and it was significant.

But something else was real too: the emptiness. That’s the only word for it. A well-paying job in a respectable company, and this persistent, vague sense that I was drifting away from something I’d been building toward. I couldn’t quite name it then. I just knew it was there.

A WhatsApp Message That Changed Everything (Again)

Eventually, the chance I hadn’t planned for showed up in the most ordinary way: a casual message to an old colleague.

I was near the end of my Master’s in the UK — things had come together after all, just not in Sweden — and I reached out to Saad Mazhar Hashmi, someone I’d worked with at the firm, just to say hello. We hadn’t spoken in a while. No agenda. Just keeping in touch.

He asked if I wanted to come back.

I said yes almost immediately. Which surprised me a little, honestly.

My friends thought I was making a mistake. My family wasn’t entirely convinced either. I was returning to a firm at the Associate I level — effectively a step down from where I’d left — after a Master’s degree and years of industry experience. On paper, it looked like regression.

I knew what it actually was: a chance to finish something.

Back at Ferguson. Back at the Bottom. Back in Audit.

March 2023. I rejoined A.F. Ferguson & Co. as an Associate I.

And history — as it apparently enjoys doing — repeated itself. I was placed in Audit again.

There were moments during those 1.5 years when I wondered, genuinely, whether I was being naive. Whether the pattern I kept expecting to break was just… the pattern. Tax, then Audit, then Deals — except this time, maybe it would stop at Audit. Maybe that was the answer I’d been refusing to accept.

Then came the transfer request. And this time, there was a condition attached: if I didn’t perform well on the current assignment, the transfer might not happen.

I don’t know exactly how to describe the feeling of having your career hinge on a single assignment. It focuses you in a way that’s difficult to explain. You’re not panicking. You’re just… very present.

What followed — whether it was the work itself, or timing, or something I can’t quantify — led to a permanent transfer to Deals.

Permanent. That word meant something.

The Promotion. And Then the Next Question.

Once inside Deals, things moved. I was promoted to Senior Associate I, and was told plainly: if you want the Assistant Manager promotion, you need to do something exceptional.

That kind of clarity is actually useful. No ambiguity, no vague performance reviews. Just an honest bar.

Around this time, I also completed my ACA qualification and became an ICAEW member. I don’t want to overstate it, but I do think it mattered — not just as a credential on a CV, but as a signal of seriousness and technical depth. It added something to the overall picture.

And now I’m working toward exactly that — the Assistant Manager promotion. It’s sitting right in front of me. I know what’s expected. I know the standard. Whether I get there in nine months or longer, I genuinely don’t know. But I know I’m closer than I’ve ever been, and I know what it took just to be in the room where that conversation is even possible.

That’s not nothing.

What I’ve Learned From Going the Long Way

I’m not sure this story has a clean lesson. Life rarely does.

What I can say is this: the detours weren’t detours. Audit, both times, taught me things I use now. The Sweden plan that collapsed pushed me toward a UK Master’s I didn’t know I needed. The industry job, frustrating as it felt, showed me what I actually valued by contrast.

And the stubbornness — the very specific, somewhat irrational insistence on Deals — turned out to be information. Not arrogance. Just clarity about what I wanted and enough patience to keep showing up for it.

My parents’ blessings meant more through all of this than I ever said aloud. And I don’t think any of it would have unfolded the way it did without the grace of Allah and Rasool Allah (ﷺ).

The Assistant Manager role is what I’m chasing right now. I don’t know exactly what that journey looks like yet. But that’s what Part 2 is for.

Thanks for reading this far. If any part of this resonated — the rejection, the waiting, the doubt, the going-back-when-people-thought-you-shouldn’t — I’d genuinely love to hear about it in the comments.