Summer Internship with Microsoft Services Global Delivery – Anurag Chatterjee from Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur
Daily Winner for: – 27th August 2013
Name of the intern: – Anurag Chatterjee
Institute: – Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur
Organization interned with: – Microsoft Services Global Delivery
Microsoft does not compromise on quality ever. The selection process for my internship with Microsoft Services Global Delivery (MSGD) was a testimony to this fact. I applied for the internship by submitting my CV via a college senior of mine working in MS-IDC. My CV got accepted and I was asked to appear for 2 online written tests. Around 700 candidates appeared for the written tests for the various branches of Microsoft. As luck would have it I had selected the services branch quite unknowingly. I qualified the written tests and then 2 phone interviews were scheduled. They were technical and consisted of basic CS questions to the MS interview questions available over the internet. I got the news via email that I had qualified both the phone interviews and was asked to report to Hyderabad for personal interviews.
I had to skip one of my mid-semester examinations and board a flight along with another friend from my college to Hyderabad. It was simply amazing! All arrangements were made by Microsoft- from plane tickets to cabs to receive us from the airport. When we reached the office, we were pretty tensed. There were 3 candidates (two from Chennai and one from Bangalore) already waiting. There was one technical interview which went well and one HR interview which started off by the interviewer telling me “what if I tell you are not selected” and observing my reaction! It mainly consisted of observing my personality, some stress and “what makes you stand apart” questions. I did answer the questions to his liking and he shook my hands and said that I was technically proficient (feed-back from previous interviews) but since I had not made any windows based applications that did not show. He smilingly added that I was selected and my date for internship would be 10 June ’13 to 2 August ’13. I later got to know that out of the 8 candidates who came for the face to face interviews 5 got selected.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. I prepared for the internship very well. Microsoft did provide us with subscription in Plural-sight. I knew this was a golden opportunity and I had to grab it.
Microsoft had made arrangement for accommodation for the first 15 days (the hotel was simply awesome). First day we were given stationery, laptops, cool bags and assigned work stations. We had to work alongside full time employees!!We were also given a brief on our projects. My project was to write a windows app and web app to assess the cost of migrating from older to newer versions of SQL Server. It was a high business value project for MSGD. My team consisted of five intern members (one of them had to resign due to health problems), five Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – technical, software testing and user experience (Ux) and 1 manager. Further we were also assigned buddies. Our objective was to satisfy our customer who had made the request for the project.
We followed Scrum (an agile methodology). We had daily Scrum meets with our SMEs and at the end of the week we had to give a demonstration of the work done so far to our customer. Further we had weekly one on ones with our manager who obtained feedback from our SMEs and told whether we were on the right track or not. Whenever we had any issues we could approach our SMEs, who though were busy with their own projects, would happily help us. We had complete ownership over our project, so it was our responsibility to make sure that everything worked properly (even after code refactoring). This was a bit stressful since as one of our SME put it: “Code kabhi bhi toot sakta he”. We just hoped it would not break before any high priority demo to our customer!
On the technical aspect I learnt lot- documentation, development using the latest Microsoft technologies, test, user experience (and its tremendous importance), presenting the work done. However, the most important things that I learnt were non-technical: how each employee adhered to the values of Microsoft, how only technical skills may not be enough in the corporate world and how people can seriously work and have fun at the same time in Microsoft(parties, pool, carom, cricket, Xbox, etc.).
Our team did a great job and our final presentation to the leadership team and customer was highly appreciated. My work for my team got me the team player (glue) award and yes I will be coming back here next summer, this time as full time employee!
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