My Summer Internship Experience at Microsoft, Hyderabad
In summer 2020, I got an opportunity to intern with Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd. as a Software Engineer at the Hyderabad Campus. Presently Microsoft has its 3 offices in India, at Hyderabad, Bangalore and Noida.
Applying to Microsoft
Let’s go back to September 2019. I came across a Linkedin post about openings for Summer Internship at Microsoft (May-July). Initially, I was reluctant to apply as I never thought Microsoft would hire students from a 3rd-tier college. I didn’t have much exposure towards the hiring process and work culture of MNC’s which was another strong reason for my fear. Being unaware of the rounds and consequences, with the consultation of my senior I applied for it. I have spent my college years building projects and contributing to open-source. I loved to do competitive programming in my free time but I was no expert. Prior to applying, I had also interned with 3 different startups so I had a good knowledge of the work in the corporate world.
The Interview Process
I applied for the SDE intern position through their careers page. After the shortlisting of the resume, I was provided with two dates to choose for appearing the first written round as a part of the process. It was 60 mins round and contained 3 competitive coding questions. The questions were of easy level and the students solving all the three questions within the time were shortlisted for the next rounds.
The second round was a technical-based video calling round for an hour. I was asked to write 2 competitive coding solutions on a text editor while sharing my screen. The questions were based on spiral matrix and sorting of an array with numbers containing 0,1,2 in the best time complexity along with the explanation of the code.
On successfully clearing the second round, I was invited for further on-campus interview rounds on 21st December 2019 at Hyderabad. The recruiting team had divided students as batches of students, and we were 30 students in this batch scheduled for the interview that day. The interview started at sharp 8 in the morning, I had a technical interview round it was an hour-long and it consisted of questions from writing code in paper to questions on OS, DBMS, System designing and on the workflow of the projects I have done earlier. Students selected in the technical round were called for the HR round. And later in the evening, all of the students of the particular day received the results mail. And yayyya.. I was selected. 🎉 🎉
The internship and the work culture
Due to the unforeseen situation of COVID19, this time the internship was WFH. Even though it was my first experience (and hence nervous), the URT team managed things very well for which the internship went very smoothly. The internship started sometime in May and on the first day, we were given an introductory session where all the interns set up their laptops and finished some formalities. The same day we were also assigned our team and manager, to whom we can contact further for any queries. I was assigned to an internal team that develops applications used specifically by Microsoft employees.
In MS, all the employees were open to all the doubts at any time and also we were given the opportunity to contact different teams in case of any help and learn from them. We were also required to participate in all the events, daily standups, sprints sessions, work presentations, as part of the internship responsibilities. We also had a weekly meeting with the manager where we had to share the details of the work done in the week along with a report submission every 3 weeks describing all the work and improvement points to the manager.
Learnings during the internship
Functional deliverables -
- Worked on React and Redux extensively while developing a PWA app
- Deployed the app in Azure using pipelines
- Worked on developing UI using Figma
- Developed APIs in C#
Apart from the technical work I also learnt a lot from the team, from attending daily sprints, showcasing the work, brainstorming at times to get new ideas and many more.
Amazing summer came to an end
Overall it was a great experience working at Microsoft this summer and I feel lucky to get this opportunity to intern at Microsoft. And at the end of the internship, I was also offered with the PPO to join the company from the upcoming summer :).You can find me on LinkedIn, Github and Twitter.
P.S — Highly recommend students to apply for an internship. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions :)
