2017 Microsoft Explorer Internship — Week 2

Charlotte McGinn
Jul 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Sorry I’ve been so slow about writing my posts, but alas, here is Week 2!


Week 2: First Hike, Manager Switcharoo, and Sailing

On Saturday a group of us from the Residence Inn went on my first hike in Washington, on a mountain called Little Si. I had anticipated a SoCal style hike, which are typically dusty paths moderate in difficulty. To my surprise, this trail was almost completely shadowed by lush, green forest, and was much more exhausting than I expected. Nonetheless, it was a fun hike, and we got some great shots and new friendships out of it! Later that night, we returned back to the hotel and had a cookout on the hotel patio, where we grilled up some burgers and potatoes.

on a log! (Diego, Caroline, Rachel, Katie, Emmanuel, me, and César)
we made it to the summit!
a river at the base. despite the sunny weather, the water was really cold since it was freshly melted snow.

As if we didn’t already have enough adventure that weekend, on Sunday we went to the Wild Waves Theme & Water Park (Pro tip: entry was only $9 with the Microsoft Prime Card). It was one of the first hot days this summer in Seattle so to say the least, it was crowded. We rode on a few of the rollercoasters, got some lunch, and then rode on one water ride before we decided that the lines were too long and retired to the Residence Inn pool instead. César was pretty freaked out by how red I was getting from being in the sun (don’t worry, I had lots of sunblock on) and was trying to shield me from the sun which was pretty funny. Later that night we went to a sushi place in Downtown Redmond!

one of the rollercoasters!

After work on Monday my Explorer Pod went to Seattle to take our photo as part of the Explorer Photo Challenge! Every pod was assigned a location to take a photo at and the team with the best photo and caption won a prize. Although we didn’t win, our pod had a lot of fun hanging out and bonding!

Caption: We “rose” to the occasion at the last minute! From your favorite Knowledge and Growth team (me, Danica, and Jesus)
grabbed some dinner at Uneeda Burger! (Danica)

This week our manager sat down with our pod and told us that he would be leaving Microsoft to go to Uber, and was going to move us to a different team within the same group so that we didn’t have to deal with the transition for our original team to a new manager. We had one-on-ones with our new manager who was clearly very passionate about his work and who cared a lot about making sure we learned a lot this summer. For the next couple weeks, we will spend our time at work doing tutorials to ramp up and get caught up to speed on the technology that we would be using before beginning our actual projects.

A couple more highlights from this week included visiting The Garage for a talk on Machine Learning (where I found the boxing robots pictured below) and going sailing with the Microsoft Explorer Interns. We were also preparing for our trip to Vancouver for Canada Day weekend, but that will be covered in the next post. :)

boxing robots in The Garage
sailing!
me in front of Seattle (no I’m not walking on water)
saying hi to another Explorer sailboat!

Thanks for reading!

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