I interned at Microsoft IDC (Hyderabad) which is their second biggest campus in the world outside of Redmond in the summers of 2016. Hence, I am literally reliving the experience after 4 years as I write this answer. A little bit on how I got the offer in the first place, Microsoft visited our campus in August 2015 to hire SDEs and SDE Interns and that’s when I was able to clear about 4 rounds of interviews. I got a cool T-Shirt with the Microsoft logo which I still treasure. I had about a year’s gap from the time I received the offer until I actually started interning in May 2016. There was a huge build up and me and my friends were brimming with excitement thinking about the opportunity that lies ahead of us. Microsoft does a really nice job of ensuring that Interns do not have to think anything apart from the Internship itself. They took care of our stay for a two month period and provided us with transportation which made our 30 minute daily commute super smooth. They arranged for our daily meals within the campus and our round trip flights from the city where we interned at. Apart from this there was a good stipend which made me realise my renumeration value for the first time.

Fast forward to Day 1 of internship, we entered the majestic IDC campus which was truly no less than a wonder. I personally felt it looked better during night-time.

There were multiple buildings within the campus and we were guided to our designated building and conference rooms. The recruiter had invited a few of the Software Engineers (including a few of our Alumni) to ease the nerves and tell us about what we can expect from the internship. From then on, we were set free to explore every nook and corner of the campus. I met my team, my mentor and my manager. Took some time to setup my work-desk setting up the software and hardware.

It was the best feeling to have unlimited Azure Credits, enterprise licensed software for Visual Studio and Windows 10 and for the first time developing software on Windows Platform felt seamless (as against Pop-Culture) and what most of us were used to while working on Linux.

Now we all were on a mission to explore the many perks within our building. And no post about the MS IDC campus can be complete without the mention of the infamous pantry. There was unlimited stock of almost all refreshments by Amul, Coke, Green Tea, Coffee, Cookies, CCD. You name it and it was there.

There were multiple playing facilities like Cricket, Football, Gym facilities, Table Tennis and Pool. Sukul Bagai and I had a very religious routine of our TT breaks and Pool sessions. And by the end of the internship we were pretty good at these sports.

Gradually all of us got really engrossed with work. Everyday we would have to read about a lot of techniques and patterns to be able to make progress. The office culture was pretty open and people around were really approachable and helpful. People were serious about their work during the day time and by the evenings everything toned down. Initially I was a bit hesitant to do anything apart from work at my work-desk but then my team-mates joined me for streaming a couple of tennis matches. All of us were Roger Federer (tennis player) fans.

This part becomes important to understand that here it’s not about just work. There is a very nice balance between work and play over here. And hence it really helps if you maintain this balance in your life before joining a corporate.

There were social nights organised for all Interns. These sessions was also an opportunity for everyone to socialise with students from so many other colleges. It was nice to know how things worked in other institutes and their aspirations.

Hence, a very important part of your internship would be meeting other people and getting to know them. All of them excelled in programming, open-source, competitive coding, etc. and were amongst the best in the country.

There was also a very nice event organised within the campus. Kanan Gill (comedian) and The Local Train (band) were invited to perform and all of us had a gala time. I along with a couple of friends Quora User and Mahathi Gunturu were lucky to click a picture with the band members of The Local Train. That’s us with Raman Negi (musician) and other members of the band.

Microsoft also does a lot of internal hackathons. I participated in a couple of them. For the first one, I read some internal documentation for the newly released Microsoft Bot Framework. And wrote some code for a chat bot to automate a few tasks for my team. My team really appreciated the effort to complete this since it was not a milestone from my internship perspective. The second hackathon was an internal Data Science Challenge organised by the Bing Division in which all of the interns, employees including data scientists were allowed to participate. I along with a couple of my friends Sukul Bagai and Rohit Malhotra registered for this competition as we had a common penchant towards ML problems. It was a two day challenge with a prediction related problem statement around the Customer’s Ad Click Rate Prediction

The reason why I shared this story along with the above screenshot is to signify the journey from deciding to not even participate in the challenge to actually winning it. This was for sure one of our better achievements in our internships.

Hence the important learning here was that the best opportunities would not be given to you. You will need to look for them and grab them. We were not even close to being the best in ML and a lot of times you don’t have to be the best. Teamwork, enthusiasm and zeal to complete a task goes a long way.

In the final week of our internship, we all were sad and anxious about our project demos. There were also some interviews scheduled (1 or 2) depending on our performance in internship. And based on this a decision was made to make an offer or not. I was super happy to receive an offer and it was the first offer made to me for a full-time job. I went around the campus one last time, clicking some cliched photographs with the Microsoft logo and my lanyard. I am lucky to somehow have a backup of these photographs and being able to share this with all of you through this answer.

That’s it folks! That was the end of a super productive summers.

Footnotes