A summer at microsoft

1:44 PM on Sunday, August 2nd, 2020 (West Lafayette, IN)

 If I’m being honest, I kinda don’t know where to start with this post, article, thought bubble, comment, anecdote; whatever you wish to call it. Last Friday was my last day of my first ever internship. It feels odd that tomorrow I’ll have no where to log on to at 8 AM; for the past 12 weeks besides some vacation days, I’ve worked 8+ hours a day, for 5 days a week and enjoyed pretty much every second of it. Tomorrow there will be no emails to read, no code (at least not in the internship sense) to write or review, no meetings, no nothing. It’s kind of sad, but at the same time I’m very excited for the 3 or so weeks I have ahead of me before school starts, as the only uninterrupted week of no work (school or otherwise) I’ve had of 2020 was my Spring Break. . . which you might recall is right when COVID got really bad. Or I guess I should say got initially bad, as things in the US have only gone into decline unfortunately. But that’s a different thought bubble. The point is, I’m feeling reflective so I’m gonna put some thoughts down regarding my online summer.

background

I just realized, that for me, someone who has been practically living like a hermit in quarantine for the past however many weeks, I am very familiar with my current situation and you are not, so I should probably give some background about my internship. Here are the basics:

• I was an Explore intern in a pod of 2 other interns, on the EFun (Engineering Fundamentals) team on ODSP (OneDrive SharePoint).

• EFun is a team that makes tools so engineers in ODSP can do their jobs more effectively.

• The internship lasted 12 weeks and was entirely remote, meaning I logged on to my computer to work and interfaced with people via Microsoft Teams.

• I’m not sure how extensive the NDA I signed is, so I’ll provide a summary similar to those that I’ve seen on the LinkedIn’s of my fellow interns:

  • Our project was an Azure DevOps extension in two locations that served different use cases.

  • It was a full-stack project, that involved making a database, API, worker to populate the database, and front-end.

  • The gist is this: we have a database that stores metrics concerning a repo’s health. Our extension displays this information in ways that are useful to engineers.

  • Another important note is that this project is being continued after we left; other teams are committed to onboarding their repos to our service.

  • I specifically worked on the front-end, which included things like designing the UI, executing and parsing API calls, logging UI side telemetry, and writing documentation for these components. I worked with Typescript, React, Recharts,, LightRail and Aria.

What does a day of work look like?

Usually, I would log on some time around 8 or 9 AM. With everyone working remote, and some people being located on the East Coast, the actual hours you worked were lax as long as you were in the meetings you needed to be in. For the first 2 months, I was on PST, and for the last month I was on EST. After logging on, I would usually do house cleaning tasks like going through messages, responding to emails, checking on PRS, etc. It was a nice way to start the morning.

From there, my intern pod would usually have a morning meeting to check in and see where the others were and what we were working on. This is where things start to get a little bit varied. Depending on the day, my team would have a meeting to discuss what we were all working on, and if anything was blocking us. We would also have meetings just with our mentors daily to provide a more in-depth description of what we were doing and where we were at. We would also have meetings with those who knew the tools we were working with, in addition to more administrative meetings regarding design processes and general big-picture goals. In addition to this there were also many intern events like virtual lunches, seminars, and activities. Through out the week we would also have 1:1’s with our managers. Each day was pretty varied, but you could always count on at least 1 check-in meeting, and the afternoon Cabin Fever Reducer - a super fun half-hour social meeting the team I was on held everyday. People might present about something they liked( I did a presentation on 3D printed rockets), an About Me, hold a book club session, play Jeffpardy(a Jeopardy spin-off made by our GEM), play Pictionary, or just shoot the breeze.

my favorite parts

This is a tough one.

There were just so many great things about this summer. I think one of the main ones that made it particularly great though was the team I was on. Everyone on the EFun team was super nice and inviting and interesting. I felt like I could strike up a conversation with any of them, and reach out if I needed help with a problem I was having. The atmosphere was so great in a virtual setting, I can only imagine what it must be like to be in person. I met so many amazing people and it was really amazing to be on such a passionate and happy team. They held DEBUG meetings - meetings that started discussions about Black Lives Matter, and LGBTQ issues, among other topics. In addition to this there was also a women’s group that met for lunch meetings that consisted of talking about goals, ways to help, and general experiences. I also appreciated how candid everyone was - everyone had their own path to where they got and they were never afraid to share it even if it included considerable hardships. Acknowledgements of things like impostor syndrome and feelings of inadequacy from these top engineers was something I think I really needed to hear, and it was also great to hear about how they cope with such feelings. It was just a great environment to be in because everyone had a goal and was trying to reach it, as well as support others in such a way so they could reach theirs.

More specifically than EFun, I was also extremely happy to have had an amazing pod of fellow interns to work with - Katelyn (Georgia Tech) and Lauren (ASU). They’re seriously some of the smartest people I’ve ever met and it was so fun to work with them. They were always thinking about ways our project could be better, what we could do to improve it, and how to make sure it would be used once we left. Besides this, they were just super fun and nice. By the end of our internship, we referred to ourselves as ‘The Minions’ - a term that arose after we began ironically sending minion gifs to each other after each of our little successes at the beginning of the summer. Below is an image of all of us(left to right: Katelyn, me, Lauren) that was on a quiz we made as our mini hackathon project in our final week:

Finally: everything I learned. At times it certainly felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant(shout out to my pod-mate Katelyn for the analogy), but it was always doable. I think this summer is the most challenged I have ever been, but it was so worth it. I must admit, for a while it felt like I was just barely hanging on; this was my first internship, and I had only ever made personal programs or scripts with Java, C, Python, or Processing. I had played around a little bit with websites and stuff but never to this extent. I had never really used Git; I didn’t even know what a PR was. It seemed like there were all these tools that would take years to learn effectively that I now had to become an expert in in a matter of weeks. However, now on the other side it feels so great to look back at everything I learned. From tools and technologies from React to Git to Typescript to LightRail to Kusto to Aria to AZDO and everything in between. Even just learning how to communicate, plan a project, and execute it. All of these great things, big and small, that just put the biggest smile on my face when I look back on my summer.

what I learned

• When you’re on a team, you’re there to help everyone and everyone is there to help you. If someone knows how to do something, ask them and learn from them.

• Work isn’t like school. There are many ways to do something, and it’s up to you to weigh the pros and cons and make that choice with the knowledge you have.

• True friendship is when your coworkers know when your dog goes to doggy day care (a quote from an engineer on EFun).

• Taking time off is as important as spending time on a problem.

• If you’re faced with a problem and you have no idea how to accomplish it, figure out how to do just a little itty bitty part of it, and go from there.

• If you write code like someone is over your shoulder you’ll save yourself a lot of time later on.

• Communicate as much as possible; what you want, what you’re stuck on, what you’ve got down, etc. You can never over-communicate.

• Remember if you’re feeling pressed or struggling with something to take a breath and slow down for a little bit. Just because you don’t know how to tackle it now doesn’t mean you won’t get it.

next steps

I’m happy to say I’ll be back at Microsoft this coming summer! Maybe not on the EFun team, but no matter what I’ll certainly be paying them all a visit in Seattle and then I can show them the EFun rocket in person! In the mean time, I’m excited to focus on school this fall. Even though this internship looked nothing like I thought it would, I am so happy it still turned out to be amazing, and that I was lucky enough to have this experience even with a global pandemic going on. I’ve had a truly amazing time this summer and I’m so happy to have learned so much. From our very first day to our very last, with on-boarding, final presentations, and lots of Jeffpardy games in between, I’ve enjoyed every moment. I’m sad to see it end but am so grateful for it to have happened.

Onwards and upwards right?