I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the Microsoft family via Codess. Initially, like many of you know, I was unaware of the opportunities available out there for empowering women. Codess is one of those amazing opportunities offered by Microsoft to students.

What is Codess?

Codess is a community for female coders by Microsoft, established to explore ways to promote gender diversity in the engineering field.

How to be a part of Codess Family?

The procedure involves one online coding round which involves three questions with different difficulty levels (1 easy, 1 medium, 1 hard). The candidates selected after the coding round are invited to attend a seminar held at the Microsoft campus, Hyderabad. In the first half of the day, there were a couple of leadership talks focusing on the idea: ‘Be the CEO of your idea’. We were shown a video of Tim Cook unveiling an iPhone which presented us with many insightful points about presenting ourselves. Over lunch, we interacted with a lot of leaders and students from different colleges. The main highlight of the event was the second half of the day in which we had a hackathon. We were divided into teams of 8-9 members and each team was assigned a mentor. In the 2-hour long hackathon, we were asked to come up with any technology idea and cover points like how the idea is to be implemented, what accomplishment is expected to be achieved through the idea, etc. The mentors assigned for each team shared the best practices, while the teams deliberated and discussed different approaches and came up with solutions. The mentors also assessed each of us on different skills (like confidence, knowledge of tech, team spirit, etc). After 2 hours of brainstorming, we had to present our ideas (keeping in mind what we were taught during the morning sessions) in front of the leaders. It was a great event as we came in teams to collaborate on new and innovative ideas and experienced how team spirit plays an important role in driving towards a goal and how everyone’s participation makes it possible to achieve that goal. Although the winners of the hackathon were announced at the venue itself students selected for the internship were announced via mail after a few days.

Work Culture

After the orientation, each intern is assigned to a team and a project. The intern is assigned a mentor and a manager. The mentor is your go-to person, he is the one who has experience of the project and will be guiding you for the next two months.

The Project I Worked On

I worked under the Azure Networking team. Azure Networking is further divided into various other smaller teams based on the products, services, and platforms they are responsible for. Second Year: In the second year, I interned in Foundry. I was under the AzureNetworking NetPerf Team. We were a team of 5 members(4 developers and 1 UX-Designer). Our project was named PEAS (Performance Evaluation As a Self-service). It aimed at providing a platform to monitor health to ensure the availability of their network solutions with automated monitoring and alerts.

I got a PIO (Pre-Internship offer after my internship in the second year)

Third-year:

I was assigned EAP (aka Elastic Autopilot)Team. In this process, I was assigned a mentor. I was glad that my project was not a POC and was something that will soon be in production. My work mainly focused on improving the overall monitoring and automation by reducing false alerts, thus reducing the load on ICMs and avoiding redundant manual efforts put in by the team as of now.

The Overall Experience

In the beginning, I was quite overwhelmed by my project, but eventually, you get a better understanding of it. The only important thing is that you put your issues on the table, ask for help if you need. Since I was the only intern in my team(in the third year), it took me a while to know the project, people and get comfortable with them. But the best part was, though you are assigned a mentor and he is responsible for resolving your issues, the other team members are also supportive. You just need to ask for help and everybody is always there to help you in the best possible way they can.
There are no strict office timing schedules that you need to follow, but try to sync it with your daily scrums and also with your mentor’s office timings. There is no dress-code, wear anything you are comfortable in. There are various efforts put by the team to make you comfortable which include team outing and team lunches. We had team lunches at some very fancy places in Hyderabad (perks of a corporate life :-p)

I was also given a farewell lunch on the last day of my internship.

Apart from your projects, Microsoft also has an annual entertaining event called “Unwind” where you have stand-ups and band performances. An “intern week” is also organised during the internship, where they have events like painting sessions, leadership talks, and others. Gladly, the overall corporate experience for me was fun and insightful.

My Takeaways

I really like the work culture Microsoft has adopted and the best part is that they have maintained this culture over the years without fail. If you want to learn about a particular team’s work, their plans for future projects or you want to discuss something about that particular field, the only thing you need is the will and the courage to ask and some people will help you irrespective of their positions, teams or experience. It does not matter if you know them or not, you just have to send a message and ask them if they could meet you for lunch or coffee to discuss that particular topic. They will be more than happy to do so. Believe me. I have tried and tested it.