Walking through the Microsoft Engage Mentorship Program with Ria
Have you ever imagined getting mentored by your dream company itself?
Through Microsoft Engage, the flagship Engagement & Mentorship Program of Microsoft, you can get a chance to be a part of 1:1 mentorship, AMA Sessions, Webinars, and Leader talks delivered by Microsoft employees.
In addition to this, at the end of the program mentees get a chance to interview for a summer internship or direct internship offers from Microsoft based on their submission & mentors’ feedback.
My name is Ria Monga. I am a 3rd-year student at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology pursuing a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering.
I was selected as a mentee for this program for the year 2021 and in this blog, I am going to discuss the 5 phases of Microsoft Engage’21 & what an amazing learning experience it was.
Be Agile.
Agile- was the theme of Engage’21 and these phases that you are going to see are actually various sprints of the scrum.
What is Agile Methodology?
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that involves regular testing & improvement — planning is performed in a very short term. Agile promotes teamwork, flexible procedures, and sle (Service level expectation) organizing teams.
Scrum: It is a development cycle divided into multiple 2–3 week-long sprints along with morning meetings, sprint reviews & scrum meetings for coordinated work.
Phase 0: Registration & Resume Shortlisting
To be able to participate in this program, you need to fulfill certain eligibility criteria, which for our year was as follows:
- Year of Graduation: 2nd year of study
- CGPA: 7 and above.
- Course: B.Tech/B.E/Dual Degree
- Branch: Any
- No pending backlogs
- Strong CS Fundamentals and Coding principles required
If eligible, you can register through the job portal. To apply for Microsoft Engage 2022, click here.
Major application documents include a resume & sharing your experience so far(along with the required certificates).
4 to 5 days post-registration, all the shortlisted candidates received an invite for a test. And with this, we begin:
Phase 1: Qualify
Online Test for Engage 2021: It was a 45-minute long test with 7 MCQs & 8 subjective questions and no negative marking.
Here are some sample questions:
DSA-based:
- Prove that the height of a binary tree with n nodes is O(logn).
- Insertion in an AVL tree(with n nodes) requires O(logn) rotation. True or False. Explain your choice.
- Write a program to implement a priority queue using a heap.
- What is the output of the DFS traversal of a graph?
- Prove the time complexity of the Tower of Hanoi is O(2^N).
- Write a program for Stirling approximation.
- What is merge sort? Implement merge() function.
- The depths of any two leaves in a max heap differ by at most 1. True or False. Explain your choice.
Mathematics:
- Advance Hashing- collision resolution strategies, chaining.
- Optimal Stopping problem.
Git-based:
- Explain the git add command.
- Explain the git init command.
- How do we push changes to a repository?
- What does the git checkout command do?
Output-based:
- What will be the output of the following code etc?
- Sorting techniques like Insertion Sort.
- Algorithms like: Binary Search, Exponential Search.
- Time & Space Complexity.
Brain-storming questions:
- Explain recursion to your grandmother who is not a computer person.
A week later, the results for the test were out and I received a mail saying:
The feeling was cloud 9++. And despite the adrenaline rush due to happiness, I felt a burden of responsibility. You can say it was the excitement & the duty to build a great app to make the best out of this opportunity. Hence, I started working on my app the very day I got to know I had qualified for the test.
The Challenge
We were supposed to build a Microsoft Teams Clone with at least one mandatory functionality — a minimum of two participants should be able to connect with each other using our product to have a video conversation.
It was an individual project and we had to submit a fully functional prototype, a video demo and our GitHub repo by the end of this challenge. Rest everything was tangible-we could add more features, design our UI, or stick to the og Teams UI/UX, make a fancy video, build Web app, website or even mobile app, etc i.e. in short, there was no limit to our creativity & imagination leave alone the mandatory feature.
Though, there was a surprise for us in the last week.
Kick-off Meeting & AMAs
The challenge started with a Kick-off meeting which briefed us about the program. Throughout the program, various Ask Me Anything sessions(AMAs) were held to resolve doubts and share new information.
Phase 2: Design
I used this phase to Research the best technologies to design the app since code performance was also a part of the judging criteria.
Finally, I decided to make a Website with a UI similar to that of MS Teams and did basic designing using Figma.
While I was working on this, it was time to commence 1:1 mentorship & various AMA sessions. We were invited by our mentors for an introductory call.
1:1 mentorship
Each mentee under this program was allotted 2 mentors(each group consisted of 6–7 mentees).
In 4 weekly sessions, mentors shared feedback, resolved doubts, shared tips & tricks to succeed. Other than technical guidance, they shared the experiences of their corporate journey & the work culture at Microsoft. The continuous support from mentors kept me motivated and consistent throughout my journey.
Mentors feedback matter: The final judgment is done taking into consideration your whole project, assignments you submit as well as feedback received from your mentors.
Phase 3: Build
I started building a video conversation app using WebRTC & PeerJS library & a chat app using React and chatengine.io.
I used this time for adding features, resolving bugs, combining, and deploying my app.
Webinars and Leader Talks delivered by Microsoft employees
During this tenure, several educational* & personal development webinars were also organized for the students. Microsoft employees talked about their learnings & experiences with an open heart. This not only gave us a sneak peek into the corporate world but also motivated us in many ways. One of the learnings I carry with myself till date is something, that Mr. Kiran Bangalore said in his Leadership Talk —
“The motivation to work for a company like Microsoft doesn’t come from the money or the swags, it comes from the mere fact that your code is used by millions & billions of people all over the world”.
*Some sessions were followed by a quiz or assignment.
Phase 4: Adapt
The Surprise!
As Agile methodology is all about iterative development of the project and adapting to new features based on customer feedback, in the Adapt phase we had to incorporate an “additional” feature in our app which was revealed to us in the last week. It wasn’t a mandatory feature but could win us extra points.
For us, it was to add a ‘Chat’ feature to our app.
Phase 5: Submit
For the final submission, we had to submit a video demo & a link to our GitHub repository.
It was optional to submit a presentation.
Tip: Since the final submission is done in the form of a video & GitHub repo, try to make it as presentable as you can. It’s your endgame. Use a variety of batches, images, and markdown tricks to make your Github repo.
Here is a sneak peek into my submission for Engage 2021:
You can check out the full source code here:
Conclusion
After 1–2 weeks, emails regarding the interview process were sent out. While some received mails for technical rounds, others got Final(AA) round mails and some even received direct internship offers from Microsoft. These emails were based on our submissions & mentors’ feedback. The interviews were held on MS Teams.
This was all about my MS Engage journey and how I acquired a whole new set of skills during it. I hope I have motivated you enough to apply next year and be a part of such an amazing opportunity. Share this blog with your friends too so that they can learn about this opportunity and apply for the same ✌.
If you have any doubts or queries, please feel free to ping me. I’d love to help you. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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