From outside, to inside
It all began 3 years ago when I was a freshman at the University of Washington. I remember taking a class on cryptography which included taking all of us to a field trip to Microsoft Redmond campus and therein began the dream.
Retrospection
I am a senior now. I know I will probably sound like one when I say this, but over the years I spent at the University, I have realized just how important and invaluable hard work is. I have made mistakes, learnt from them which in turn helped me transform that field trip into an opportunity to work for one of the biggest organizations in the world.
Junior year was when I pulled my socks up and switched gears to land that first internship. Being an international student is not easy. A huge amount of resources and capital are required to survive in the US. After waiting in multiple long career fair queues, I finally ended up getting an interview call from Microsoft which was scheduled for sometime in February. Junior year was hard and long. I was still in the boat of uncertainty, trying to figure things out. It was nothing short of a roller coaster ride. In fact I remember flying back to Delhi in search for peace and get my mind back in the right space. By now, college had made me realize the value of family who always impart one with unconditional support and guidance.
I had taken the interview and it had been around 4 weeks since I heard back anything. Tensions were running high and although I kept a brave face in front of my family members, deep inside, anxiety was running high. Due to the time difference, I used to check my email till 1 or 2 in the morning, hoping for a response. Jet lag, for a change, was helpful. Then suddenly, the email that all of us were waiting for came at around 1:30 in the morning. I could not contain myself and just shouted, “Maa! Maa! We made it!”. My parents were elated. Mom and I then went down for a walk where we reminisced all the moments that got us here. We had a cup of chai to take it all in. Following this was a phone call to my uncle and aunt who have been my guardians in Seattle and have played a huge role in getting this job.
First Day
I decided to report to office an hour early for my first day before the orientation. The first thing I did was to take a picture at the same place 3 years back. Sending it to mom and dad made me realize what a journey it has been.
I will be completely honest and tell you that Microsoft absolutely loves their interns and pampers them to the fullest. In fact, there were many occasions where we made the FTEs incredibly jealous and made them wish that they were interns as well.
Experience
I interned at Microsoft in the summer of 2018 as a software engineer on the Azure Commercial Experiences team. I was responsible for developing and designing two new features on the Azure portal, namely, EA polices and EA subscriptions which contribute to an ongoing effort of bringing everything under one Azure portal (Satya way!). I was endowed with an incredibly smart and helpful team which guided me with utmost patience and support throughout my 12 weeks at Microsoft. It was here that I realized just how important it is to look at the big picture and realize what impact my work will make in the world. Being a software engineer is so much more than just being someone who can write good code. Decisions you make need to be backed up with reason and should be scalable and implementable in the real world.
The experience for my first few weeks was designed in such a way that I was able to get used to my environment. This involved setting up my own workstation from scratch and setting up the codebase that I would be working on. It is in the process of doing this that I realized just how extensive and nested codebases for organizations can be. It took me entire first week to set up the development environment, hookup the mock values for the Azure Enterprise portal and get the code running without any glitches. This is when all my lessons from the numerous courses I had taken became fruitful as the importance of writing production quality code became clear.
I remember my manager always talking about the importance of writing code in a way that it tells a story. He always stressed on the importance of naming variables meaningfully and writing functions in a chronological order. By inculcating these practices, I was soon writing code that did not need comments to be able to comprehended by other software engineers, not only on my team but in others as well. This is something that I have tried to teach my students in Client Side Web Development as well.
During week 6 and 7, my team and I also participated at the annual Hackathon organized by Microsoft as well. In the words of my manager, this gave us the opportunity to bond outside work to increase productivity and efficiency at work.
The hackathon gave me the opportunity to step into a managerial role. We had decided on building a web platform for people with rare diseases to connect with each other. The end-to-end experience had to designed, developed and deployed in 3 days. During the design meetings, I had suggested to use React as the framework to develop the front-end. However, this time I had to convince other developers to use the framework by specifying the pros and cons and clarifying the whys behind using it. After having convinced all the developers on my team, next up was taking the lead in the front-end development process as I had the maximum experience with React. This was a crucial highlight of my internship experience as my manager and teammates showcased their trust in me by allowing to lead a development cycle in a safe environment.
During the last few weeks of my internship, when I was mostly done with the project assigned to me, I asked my manager to let me sit in of the ‘Big Boys’ meetings. These meetings were the ones in which senior officials came together and decided what I should be working on. I really wanted to join in on of these meetings since I always wanted to understand the why behind the decisions that were taken at my organization. My manager agreed and I got to be part of an upcoming feature development meeting. This proved to be one of the best learning experiences of my internship since in here I realized that writing code is generally the easy part of the job. It is deciding what feature to develop and what data points to collect the telemetry on and in how much capacity to improve the user experience that take time, effort and skill. Walking out of that meeting, it was clear in my mind that this is something that I want to do, since it challenges me to step outside my comfort zone and creatively solve problems on the go.
Conclusion
There were numerable highlights throughout my internship. Whether it was the Q&A with Satya or the famous Intern Signature event or the amazing friends I made along the way, my journey at Microsoft could not have been more exciting. But perhaps, the most important aspect of internship that I would like to share here is that I got to learn so much from so many smart people. Whether it was receiving 47 comments on my first PR which eventually made my code tell a story or emphasizing the importance of good communication to get work done smoothly and efficiently, my internship experience has taught me invaluable lessons that I not only plan to apply in all my future endeavors but teach and share with others as well.
