In this article, Anamitra Mandal, Dept. of EEE, shares her experience of working as an intern with Microsoft for two consecutive years 2019-20.
In 2019, while taking the Codess online test, not even once did it occur to me that I would even stand a chance to be mentored by Microsoft, let alone an internship. Even when the test went well, I assumed that it might have gone well for a lot of people. But after a month I received a mail which said that Microsoft would host me for a mentored ideathon at their Hyderabad office. I attended the event and after a couple of weeks received a call that they wished to extend an internship offer to me. The call stirred a lot of emotions, I was extremely happy to have received the offer but and at the same time I was nervous because I have had no prior experience at software development.
First day of the internship period was all about orientations and setting up PCs. The very next day we were given a brief introduction to all the projects that were allotted for the Foundry interns. I opted for a project that had web development (because at least I had some idea about it) and had “something” to do with “Quantum Computing” — which sounded pretty fancy to me. Later that day I met the whole team (which included five interns, two mentors and a manager) where we discussed about the project, the parts where each one of us would focus and from where we should get started. Can not dig deeper into the project but all that I can say is that, a lot of concepts as well as the tech stack were new to me and some of my fellow interns but we did work together to sort things out. We had daily stand-ups where every intern would update the mentors about their progress and the blockers that they faced. Even outside the stand-up timings we would often seek help from our mentors whenever we were stuck at something or had to take a certain decision in moving forward. Not just mentors, we also sought help from interns who were in other teams. Bi-weekly code reviews were held to evaluate the quality of the code that we wrote. Within the course of 8 weeks, two demonstrations were arranged where the interns presented their final work to the Leadership Team.
Even within the office hours, we would find enough time to play pool, pictionary, jenga, carrom, etc. Microsoft has a whole week dedicated to the interns — “The Intern Learning Week”, where fun activities and events are organized for the interns and on the last day of that week interns get a chance to showcase their talents (apart from coding of course!).
I was fortunate enough to have worked with people from different colleges across the country and be mentored by some wonderful and learned mentors who instilled both knowledge and confidence in the interns.
On the last day of my internship, I received an offer for internship for the next year. Initially I was anxious — if at all we would have the internship or not, because earlier this year the New Hires Day event was called off. Later we were notified that we would have a work-from-home internship due to the Covid-19 situation.
This year I was confident as I had already served a tenure last year as an intern and I thought things would be much easier this time. But, lo and behold, this is 2020 after all — got a project on Kubernetes on which I had zero idea, faced numerous issues with setting up my PC and just when I thought “never mind, I will learn it all from the internet ”, Amphan ravaged the southern parts of West Bengal (I hail from Kolkata), so I was left without internet connectivity for almost two days. Since my co-intern had joined a week earlier and the fact that he had sound knowledge on this topic, intimidated me even more. So, the initial weeks went in ramping up on general concepts of the topic and setting up the environment for the project.
It was nerve-wracking for a person who could not even pronounce the word “Kubernetes” on day one to come up with ideas for the project and at times it did feel that things were going out of hands. We would have daily sync-ups which was very similar to last year’s stand-ups but were more elaborate (may be to compensate for the work from home situation) where I would surface my doubts to the mentors and I would frequently ask my co-intern to guide me through. But finally, things did fall into place and I was able to complete my project successfully (something that I could not even imagine during the initial days of the internship).
I must acknowledge that life would be much easier had I done the internship on campus and I could have learnt even more about technology. But I couldn’t agree more to say that this year’s internship has taught a lot to me, not just about technology but also how to adapt to difficult situations, how not to break my head over thinking whether I will be able to complete the project by the end of the internship but rather to focus on putting in the best of my efforts.
Internships help students gain exposure to the corporate world. It helps one to translate all the theoretical knowledge to practice. Although I interned at the same company for two consecutive years, but there was a marked difference between both the experiences. My first internship introduced me to the corporate world, taught me to how to work in teams and take educated decisions. The key takeaway from this year’s internship was to push my limits, come out of the comfort zone and be open to learning more. Given a choice, I would always opt for an on-campus internship because it is fun and human beings being social creatures like to interact which faces some restrictions in a remote internship. Everyone should leverage the internship tenure to learn and network with people and consider feedback to grow into a better professional and individual.
To the people who are gearing up for their first ever internships — you might have no prior knowledge on the topic or the tech stack of the project that would be assigned to you; ask your doubts, no matter how basic and fundamental they might seem. Do not be intimidated if your teammate “knows it all”, rather leverage his/her knowledge to enhance yours. It is very important to have a growth mindset. Even if you end up with a project to which you have prior knowledge, you will find ample scope to learn new skill sets and improve the existing ones. Consider everyone’s feedback — even your co-interns’ feedback matter, network with people around you and be open to new ideas. Do not let the internship be yet another bullet point added to your resume, rather make sure that you have surpassed yourself (what you were before the internship) in terms of both technical skills and personality after the completion of the internship!
