Priyanka Jain is a 4th year student in the Department of Computer Science and engineering. Read on as she recounts her experience of working with Microsoft, Hyderabad during the summers of 2016.

At Microsoft, interns work on projects that matter – and the team will rely on your skills and insights to help deliver those projects to market. You’ll get the opportunity to work on real projects and have fun along the way. This is your chance to show off your skills and work on cutting-edge technology. MSIDC hires for two locations in India- Hyderabad and Bangalore. I was assigned the Microsoft India Development Centre, Hyderabad.

Making it there

Selection Process : Microsoft has a quite simple but repetitive selection process.

Rounds

• The first round was the MCQ round with 15 questions based on basic algo and data structure. 10 minutes were allotted for this round and around 40 students were shortlisted after this.
• The next was the online coding round. In this 3 questions were asked, again from data structures. All the students got through .
• Next was the group fly round, where they asked to write the working code of the given 2 or 3 questions, on paper. After this around 20 students were shortlisted.
• Next was again a similar round, they gave one question and asked to write its working code on paper. Around 15 students were shortlisted for the final interview.
• In the final interview the interviewer asked me to give the basic solutions of the data structure based 3 questions. I don’t know if he was satisfied with my answers or not.

The most important and I guess the only thing you need to do to crack Microsoft’s selection process is to brush up your coding skills and go through the Algo and DS sections of geeksforgeeks thoroughly. Application process starts a week before the tests actually start. Students are asked to submit their resume to the TPO and also fill the priorities among the companies which arrive on the same day. There is no cg criteria as such, but even if there is , then it must be above 6 or 6.5 I believe.

Work

I was placed in the STCI (Search Technology Centre India) Bing local team along with 3 more interns.The project allotted to me was mainly frontend development. It was basically about designing a dashboard to provide at-a-glance view of KPIs (key performance indicators) for Bing team’s internal use . All the projects were idiosyncratic.

The first 1 or 2 weeks were invested into getting acquainted with the internal tools and languages. We made a rough outline of the workflow for the rest of the weeks, which is updated regularly as the project progresses.

The mentorship program at MS is really nice. Every intern is assigned to a mentor and a manager.Specifically talking, my mentor was like my project partner. Not only we discussed every idea thoroughly before taking it in front of the manager, but he also guided me through all the major or minor block points during the entire internship period. Again my manager was also very helpful, we used to have a weekly meeting specifically for my project .

The work culture at MS is really cool and relaxed , there is no restriction as such. Weekly sync meetings make sure that the work is not delayed and the rest is all upto you ,how you want to work , at what hours etc. Although the nature of work depends mostly on the project at hand, most of the time life is easy.

Summing up and key takeaways

The intern provided a great insight into the software development industry. Knowing how this tech giant pulls off work has been a wonderful experience.This was the first development experience for me, so I had a lot to learn. Knowledge in specific areas is not a prerequisite if you are clear with your basics. The entire team at Microsoft was cooperative and guided me through my incompetencies. Even if you know stuff, there is a lot more to learn out there, so keep gaining!

If you have an internship experience you’d like to share, get in touch at watchout.iitr@gmail.com